Game development on a Hollywood budget

By David Hollingworth
10:17 Mar 1, 2010 | 7 Comments
Tags: game | development | costs | news

Essential linkage: What are the most expensive games ever developed?

The debates over games versus movies - which medium is more socially relevant, which one is more popular, and so on - is rather endless, but there's one portion of it that we can now put to rest.

The matter of budget.

The team over at Digital Battle has just posted a very illuminating little story that lists the top ten games in terms of development costs, with some very interesting results - like Too Human costing a whopping $60 million to make! We're pretty sure that one ran at a loss.

Anyway, here's the top ten list (all costs are in US lucre); click through the full list for some insightful commentary to boot:

10. Killzone 2 ($45 million)
09. Final Fantasy XII ($48 million)
08. LA Noire ($50 million)
07. APB ($50 million)
06. Halo 3 ($55 million)
05. Metal Gear Solid 4 ($60 million)
04. Too Human ($60+ million)
03. Shenmue ($70 million)
02. Gran Turismo 5 ($80 million)
01. Grand Theft Auto 4 ($100 million)

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7 Comments

nesquick Mar 1, 2010 11:37 AM	wow I can believe GTA4 and halo3 but never thought the others would be so much.
battlefield_gir Mar 1, 2010 11:37 AM	Hmmm, are development costs inclusive of royalties to musicians? i would have thought that games such as guitar hero etc would end up paying more then that to enable the use of various artists music. On the other hand, movies can allow for higher development costs as the actual product " the film" equates for only a fraction of the return on investment.think about product exposure and merchandise. Think kids movies and the amount of revenue they make allowing food chains like maccs to include toys of popular film characters, plastic movie themed lunchboxes with nemo on it, and other marketing nonsense like omega, casio, aston martin using James bond films as a advertising campaign. unfortunately games do not yet have that same market exposure so less people are willing to invest in it keeping development costs relatively low ( also they don't have to pay actors salary). At one time game developers were so dependent on a games story and eye candy trying to get the best out of each gaming platform creating new and exciting technolgies pushing the envelope for hardware developers to making a faster, more powerful machines capable of playing the more and more demanding games, those that couldn't keep up or compete with the ever growing publishers with their in house development studios either became defunct or acquired by other publishers and companies whom could then make their investment back with in game advertising and games based on products and various media (think Hasbro or waner)resulting in those generic product/movie clone games ( cat woman the game) based games that often are shit but still unceremoniously chopped hacked and eaten and spit out as some reconstituted code monstrosity ( sometimes providing a gem every now and then but usually not). overall the fact that developers can modify and splice new and old game engines (unreal 3, valves source engine) some last for ages and other technology vastly reducing the development costs of many other games built on on the base of said games. so taking into account the amount of products one studio can make using premade tech reduces time and cost for each title using said technology. /rant
A Hitman Mar 1, 2010 12:29 PM	Wonder how much they sunk into Duke Nukem Forever?
Belal WoW Mar 1, 2010 4:29 PM	GTA 4 FTW!
SceptreCore Mar 2, 2010 2:15 PM	Uh oh... wall of text. ^^
bozo01 Mar 2, 2010 2:25 PM	GTA 4 For The World! That was confusing for me when I first read that. I thought it said GTA for the world. 2D games for the world?! NOOOOOOOO....
Mademan Mar 3, 2010 1:43 PM	which is stunning, because I thought GTA4 was rubbish. Clearly most of the money went on making it in a hurry - 3 years, as opposed to 5, and on the soundtrack. To be honest, Vice City ftw. That's staggering about Shenmue, no wonder sega went bust. Is that $70 million in today's money? And they bothered to make a sequal? Most of the others are fairly believeable, either because their respective system is riding on that title (Halo 3, GT5, Killzone), or the age old saying of "we've come this far".

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