Star Citizen is close to being one of the most expensive games to develop.

from a layman's perspective I have to ask, why the fuck is it so expensive to make a video game, is software development really that costly?
 
Was this ever confirmed or denied?

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Those numbers man...goddamn.
I browsed through the Massive article, but how much is Star Citizen at?
 
delta25 said:
from a layman's perspective I have to ask, why the fuck is it so expensive to make a video game, is software development really that costly?
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Usually its half paying salaries and half marketing. Sometimes its skewed toward's marketing but even if you could hire devs @ $50,000 a year (which is low unless your brand new) if your team is in the hundreds and development takes over 2 years then your already in the 8 digit range for budget (10s of millions).
 
Yoda said:
I honestly never knew a Halo MMO had been in development. Also giant lol at the MW2 number.
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I'd be shocked if 75%-85% of that budget was marketing...

I really find it really weird that in a lot of instances here, they're spending more money on the marketing than actually making the game itself...
 
Roberts needed $21 million to create Star Citizen without a publisher and the overhead costs are low.. its not going to end up on that list.
 
Im surprised there aren't more mmos on that list. I would figure a lot of mmos would be on there considering some of the dev teams can be huge and they take longer than most games to create.
 
Always said this game is pretty much unfeasible as it stands. The performance implications alone are a huge challenge, but even design is as well. It will end up being a relatively typical space shooter, with almost nothing work seamlessly. Basically; some hub, a garage, and a spaceship battles section.
 
So... going by that list, Star Citizen is factually nowhere near being close to one of the most expensive games developed. Good to know.
 
delta25 said:
from a layman's perspective I have to ask, why the fuck is it so expensive to make a video game, is software development really that costly?
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Yes. People want to be paid for crunching a lot of hours. Even the average AAA team has about 80-100 people. Paying that many highly skilled employees for 2-3 years doesn't come cheap. If you are Ubisoft you have a lot more than that.
 
"I just don't see Star Citizen becoming a huge success."


Considering the development of the game is entirely paid for by the very people it was intended to be sold to, it already is a huge success.

You can't look at its budget and compare it to other games on the list that use a traditional publishing model that need to hit a certain sales target to pay back the publisher's investment and try to apply that to Star Citizen.
 
Grief.exe said:
They are at around 43 million raised. I highly doubt they are going to use up that entire figure during development.
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Ah ok like that, yeah now I get it...thanks.
So much money goes into game "development" these days it's seriously crazy.
 
And Project CARS will be published on 3 platforms for approx. 6M euro combined.

Some of those markrting budgets are simply crazy but it would be nice to get some perspective with actual revenue and extrapolated profits to see the real efficiency of such budgets.
 
I'm surprised that people are surprised about the FFVII figure. Marketing was nuts, and the game has a ridiculous amount of unique assets in the backgrounds. You have tons of backgrounds that were rendered and used for 30 second one-and-done scenes. On top of that it was Square's first foray into developing that kind of game, working with pretty early 3D, so it was inevitably going to be more expensive than the later games as they learned.
 
wait I knew AAA games are not cheap. But 100s of millions? You could do something about world hunger with that kind of money.

Hell you could buy 3-4 G550 Gulfstreams with that!

Where is all the money going? We already know that the developers don't get much of it.
 
Halo Mmo had less than 40 devs working on it and it costs 90 million and Bungie have over 500 people and destiny costs just 140 Million, wat?
 
Holy shit, This is Vegas had a 50 million dollar budget? Crazy that someone ever thought it would be a good idea to create a douchebag simulator. I still remember that video, showing off their hilarious strutting animation and revolutionary picking-fights-in-a-bar gameplay.

924495-20090309_this_is_vegas_e31.jpg
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FFVII number is pretty crazy considering it was the mid 90's. But then again it was marketed everywhere. And it worked out for them so okay.
 
Eh, there are a lot of developers who haven't shared their budgets, so I don't know how accurate it is to say that "It is becoming among the most expensive games". Also as others have asked: How much of that have they really spent?
 
SpyGuy239 said:
wait I knew AAA games are not cheap. But 100s of millions? You could do something about world hunger with that kind of money.

Hell you could buy 3-4 G550 Gulfstreams with that!

Where is all the money going? We already know that the developers don't get much of it.
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Uh, one could do something about world hunger from the money spent on mid tier games... Lol let's keep it to video games. =)
 
Kyoufu said:
For just game development, yes, but when you add marketing costs it jumps to $50 million.
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Canis lupus said:
Heavy Rain cost developer Quantic Dream $21.8 million to make, and with Sony's marketing budget added in, production costs topped out at $52.2 million

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/21/heavy-rain-cost-52-million-but-made-130-million-you-do-the-ma/
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Thanks for the replies. So this means Beyond had smaller Marketing budget ? because it was more expensive to make
 
I remember reading that Tera costed a shitload of money but i can't remember how much


Anyway, Star Citizen is looking amazing, so i hope it will do great
 
I think Skyrim, with marketing, was around $85 million. Considering the scope of the game, it's pretty ridiculous compared to some of the others on that list. Bethesda has always had a small team for a AAA developer, though. ~35 people made Morrowind, ~70 made Fallout 3, and ~100 made Skyrim. You have to figure a significant portion of that budget went to voice acting, too.
 
darkness_s said:
How much of the 43 million have they actually used so far, though?
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Based on the gawdy as shit DFM event's stage, signage, custom imprinted suit, and the fact that they reserved a whole meeting hall that damn big for a simple alpha reveal, I would say a good chunk. Based on the horrendous malfunctioning of the demo, perhaps not as much as initially thought.
 
Would be interesting to make a list of the games having the biggest cultural impact and see which, if any, are also on this list. Offhand, I'd say the only two in the top 10 are FF7 (#4) and Tomb Raider (#10), and I'm honestly surprised at the budgets on both of those. Must include marketing?
 
FF VII is a well-publicized $40M to 50M figure, which was a hell of a lot for a game at that time. So I guess this list includes marketing budgets for some games and not for others which is kind of sloppy ranking. Going on dev budget alone FF VII wouldn't even make this list.

If you want an expensive FF product, try The Spirits Within @ $120M.
 
Yasae said:
FF VII is a well-publicized $40M to 50M figure, which was a hell of a lot for a game at that time. So I guess this list includes marketing budgets for some games and not for others which is kind of sloppy ranking. Going on dev budget alone FF VII wouldn't even make this list.

If you want an expensive FF product, try The Spirits Within @ $120M.
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The list clearly tells so which games have their marketing included in the cost and which haven't, I don't really see the sloppy part here.
 
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