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[shinobi602]

Neat list going all the way back to Atari.

http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649

Some interesting ones:

E.T. - $23 million (licensing) - In Master of the Game — a 1994 biography about the late Steve Ross, then-CEO of Atari's then-parent company Warner Communications — Skip Paul, an Atari executive at the time, told author Connie Bruck the company spent $23 million to secure the license for the infamous bomb.

Twisted Metal - $0.8 million - In an interview with IGN, David Jaffe claimed his first car combat game cost $800,000 to develop.

Crash Bandicoot - $1.7 million - During a 2004 Australian Games Developer Conference presentation, Naughty Dog cofounder Jason Rubin said the development budget for their signature PlayStation platformer was $1.7 million.

Resident Evil 2- $1 million - Development costs on Angel Studios' Nintendo 64 port of the horror sequel were $1 million, according to a Game Developer postmortem.

Unreal Tournament - $2 million - In his Game Developer postmortem, former Epic Games programmer Brandon Reinhart said the multiplayer shooter's development budget was $2 million.

Shenmue - $47 million - In a GDC 2011 presentation, Yu Suzuki said the infamously expensive game's total cost was $47 million, not $70 million as commonly reported.

Half-Life 2 $40 million - In a 2004 interview, Gabe Newell admitted the game's development cost in excess of $40 million.

Halo 2 - $20 million - A spokesperson for Microsoft told The Wall Street Journal development costs on Bungie's sequel were under $20 million.

World of Warcraft - $200 million - In a September 2008 analyst conference call, Blizzard disclosed that the cost of four years of post-launch upkeep on the blockbuster MMO was $200 million.

Gears of War - $10 million - During a speech at the London Games Summit, Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, said development costs on the game were "around $10 million."

God of War III - $44 million - John Hight, then-director of product development at Sony Santa Monica, told Giant Bomb Kratos' first outing on HD consoles had a $44 million development budget.

Gran Turismo 5 - $60 million - In an interview with Autoweek, Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi said the fifth entry in the racing franchise cost $60 million to develop.

Watch Dogs - $68 million - Stéphane Decroix, an executive producer on the project at Ubisoft Montreal, told French business publication Challenges Ubisoft's contemporary open-world title has a development budget in excess of 50 million euros ($68 million).

 

[The Goat]

About Tree'fiddy.

Yeah, not surprising. Games are a lot of work.

 

[Zalman]

14 million for Jak and Daxter, massive jump from Crash's ~2.

 

[UnluckyKate]

big AAA games are around 30 to 50 millions now. (Uncharted, BF, and stuff like that)

 

[merrick97]

According Cliff Blezinski getting rid of used games are the way to stop the cost of these skyrocketing game budgets!

 

[Otakumegane]

Do we just not have data on Nintendo or anything?

 

[xxracerxx]

Man, Resident Evil 2 and Twisted Metal all for around a cool million? They must have been rolling in cash.

 

[epmode]

Is this pure development cost or does it include marketing (which often matches or exceeds dev costs)?

edit: It seems that they tried to isolate marketing from development when possible but a bunch of these figures may include marketing.

 

[Dusk Golem]

Resident Evil 2 really does surprise me, especially considering they had to scrap a near-finished version of the game to start from the top again.

EDIT: Wait, are they talking about the whole game development or just the N64 port?

 

[VanillaCakeIsBurning]

Witcher 2 cost something like 8.5 million I think.

 

[fernoca]

Man, Resident Evil 2 and Twisted Metal all for around a cool million? They must have been rolling in cash.

Resident Evil 2 was just the Nintendo 64 port done by Angel Studios. Twisted Metal was the first game back in the PSone days (1995), so the low budget along the small team makes sense.

 

[Fox318]

Do we just not have data on Nintendo or anything?

I can't imagine that many of their games were terribly expensive compared to games made in each era.

Like didn't Majoras mask have a small budget and 10 months to develop?

 

[zephervack]

Man, Resident Evil 2 and Twisted Metal all for around a cool million? They must have been rolling in cash.

Resident Evil 2 really does surprise me, especially considering they had to scrap a near-finished version of the game to start from the top again.

EDIT: Wait, are they talking about the whole game development or just the N64 port?

N64 port it seems, how they got all those FMVs in a cart is wizardry.

 

[Goliath]

Resident Evil 2 really does surprise me, especially considering they had to scrap a near-finished version of the game to start from the top again.

EDIT: Wait, are they talking about the whole game development or just the N64 port?

Why, the engine was already built in Resident Evil 1. It's not like they started from complete scratch.

 

[xxracerxx]

Resident Evil 2 was just the port done by Angel Studios.

Ahh balls.

 

[MrT-Tar]

It would be interesting to find out how much a game like Xenoblade Chronicles cost to develop. It is a huge game with a wide scope and extensive voice acting in both English and Japanese. Despite that, it was on the Wii and therefore had lower resolution textures and less complex models probably reducing development time and therefore cost.

Basically, I want to know how much cheaper a 'big and ambitious' Wii game was compared to those on the other 7th gen consoles.

 

[dragonbane]

big AAA games are around 30 to 50 millions now. (Uncharted, BF, and stuff like that)

"Big" AAA games are more around 40-70 millions now I would say. Beyond for example is considered cheap with 27 million.

 

[tensuke]

$23 million for E.T., and that's all they came up with? Holy shit. Half of that must have gone to the cocaine they were on thinking that was a good idea at all.

 

[Black Mantis]

I thought the Shenmue one was pretty interesting too, $47 million, rather than the $70 million that usually gets bandied about.

 

[GillianSeed79]

I'm assuming this is before marketing right? I wouldn't have a hard time imagining Halo 2's marketing campaign costing $20 million alone.

 

[Damaniel]

So, $50M+ seems to be the standard for AAA titles these days (and there's a shocking number of games out there with $100M+ budgets). No wonder it's so hard to innovate in the AAA space -- when you have to sell 3-5 million copies of a game just to break even, playing it safe is pretty much your only choice.

 

[grosvenor_92]

Looking at Watch Dogs I'm wondering how much that number has changed since the delay and how that's gonna affect Ubisoft's sales expectations

 

[AlphaTwo00]

Gears of War - $10 million - During a speech at the London Games Summit, Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, said development costs on the game were "around $10 million."

Gears has always been interesting, because it's obvious that they've shuffled the numbers into different buckets (like cost of getting UE3 on consoles) as a separate component. It's hard to take that number seriously when the likes of Ubisoft was shipping Red Steel 1 on Wii at roughly the same cost.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

Are these taking marketing budgets in to account? Development and product are not so quickly separated and that can balloon some games in to the $150 million+ range.

 

[Deleted member 22576]

I'd kill to see the budgets for Rare's n64 titles. Those games had so much content and so many features.

 

[DocSeuss]

Gears of War - $10 million - During a speech at the London Games Summit, Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, said development costs on the game were "around $10 million."

Anyone know if this factors in engine costs, or would Epic count that differently because Unreal was created for its own ends and has paid for itself many times over with licensing?

 

[Arttemis]

The more pertinent information to me would be how much does it cost to make NOT including the ad and publicity budgets. Nowadays, that's more than the cost of the game development!

 

[AHA-Lambda]

ET was $23m!! O___O

 

[Dennis]

100 million.

10 million to develop the game and 90 million for marketing the game including paying PR people 500% more than they are worth.

 

[Taker34]

(and there's a shocking number of games out there with $100M+ budgets).

You mean like <10 sth games?

 

[MikeHaggar]

some of this stuff blows my mind. i just don't see how it's possible. the games i've seen where there's like 300 people in the credits did not leave an impression on me that it would have actually required 300 people to create it.

honestly, are games that much more impressive than say n64 games? i understand assassin's creed 4 is a much bigger game than banjo-kazooie (both are collectathons), but SO MUCH of the assets in assassin's creed are recycled. all of the cities look similar and all of the other islands and jungles are identical. so are the lands that you can see while sailing, but not explore.

i blame this on corporate management. the industry grew, it became extremely corporate, and now you have a ton of management. add to that how easy it is to mismanage software development and here we are.

i really hope i at least work in the game industry on one AAA game at some point just so i can see this for myself.

 

[shinobi602]

Anyone know if this factors in engine costs, or would Epic count that differently because Unreal was created for its own ends and has paid for itself many times over with licensing?

I'd imagine separate, as they take into account UE3's costs:

Unreal Engine 3 - $40 million - In a CNNMoney column about Unreal Engine 3, journalist Chris Morris reported that the cost of development of Epic's third engine was more than $40 million.

 

[Sub_Level]

Only 1.7mil for Crash holy shit

 

[dragonbane]

The more pertinent information to me would be how much does it cost to make NOT including the ad and publicity budgets. Nowadays, that's more than the cost of the game development!

This is what you are seeing right now. All these games are much more expensive with the marketing added in.

 

[Phades]

Are these taking marketing budgets in to account? Development and product are not so quickly separated and that can balloon some games in to the $150 million+ range.

That is the hollywood model for accounting, where no movie makes a profit.

I'm thinking this is just the development costs. It is telling on the smaller dev teams how the overal cost is basically moving the decimal place to the left instead of the right, like many large developers are doing currently.

 

[CadetMahoney]

latest Tomb Raider?

 

[Off-Kilter]

Shenmue's cost versus the rest of the games of that era really stands out.

 

[dragonbane]

latest Tomb Raider?

$100m total I think. But that probably includes marketing.

 

[Messofanego]

Witcher 2 cost something like 8.5 million I think.

I wonder how much Metro Last Light costs, since they're both in cheaper countries, cheaper labour, and not so good working conditions. Huge game in terms of detail and scope, while still being linear but not being a pushover in challenge playing on Ranger mode. Also, very long game.

 

[xenorevlis]

The interesting part is when you contrast these budgets to things like TV shows or movies that may or may not have big names attached. The number of people and amount of time they put into the product is very interesting.

Take the The Last of Us for instance - had a decent number of people working on it (around 100 I think) for 3 or more years and the single player alone can be 15+ hours long, plus you can jump online and use your skills on each other in 4v4 matches. This game was a HUGE commercial success and has definitely made it's entire development budget back a several times over.

Compare this to World War Z, a major blockbuster that ended up costing more than I am legally allowed to disclose, but officially the film cost close to $200 million to make and it's box office to date is a little more than twice that figure, but there were hundreds of people involved in the production of this film over several years and the real story is very unfortunate.

Edit - My point is that game development, while generally more lax than creating a TV show or movie, can end up costing a lot less for similar amounts of man hours and even talent cost to make experiences that are just as packed and engaging for 2-3 times (or 20-30 times) longer than even 3 hour films. Beyond Two Souls is a great example of this, as it is very much like a movie or TV show, yet even with Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe attached and some of the most talented artists in France on the project, their entire budget was minuscule ($27 million) compared to if they even attempted to make a 90 minute live-action movie out the madness in that story.

 

[FourMyle]

Wow, destiny cost $140 mill? That is insane, even with marketing. Let's see if the game has the content to make up for that amount. You only see that type of money poured into games with very large amounts of content like MMOs.

 

[cuyahoga]

Wow, destiny cost $140 mill? That is insane, even with marketing. Let's see if the game has the content to make up for that amount. You only see that type of money poured into games with very large amounts of content like MMOs.

It's actually possibly without marketing as the link notes.