Average Budget For Major, Multi-Platform Games Is $18-28 Million

An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Develop: "The average development budget for a multiplatform next-gen game is $18-$28 million, according to new data. A study by entertainment analyst group M2 Research also puts development costs for single-platform projects at an average of $10 million. The figures themselves may not be too surprising, with high-profile games often breaking the $40 million barrier. Polyphony's Gran Turismo 5 budget is said to be hovering around the $60 million mark, while Modern Warfare 2's budget was said to be as high as $50 million."

Comments

Shouldn't be surprising

[slim]

I don't see why this is surprising. A game has as much visual design per frame as a Hollywood CGI movie, yet is typically much longer. Add to that the interactivity. The hours of dialogue. The playtesting.

It's surprising that games are cheaper to make than movies.

Re:Shouldn't be surprising

[slim]

It turns out that many movies are actually cheaper than these big games.

http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/allbudgets.php

$20M was the budget for Into The Wild - no blowing up tanks there, but lots of location shooting.

28 Days Later: $15M
Bubba Ho-Tep: $1M
El Mariachi: $7000

Half the cost for another platform?

[Lord Lode]

I didn't read the article, but, how can making a game multiplatform almost double the cost? I thought the art, levels, motion capturing, all the data, etc... was the most expensive. Writing the code probably also is expensive, but if you develop for multiplatform a lot of code (AI etc...) can be shared and only things like renderer and input need multiple implementations, which can't be THAT much more work??

Re:Half the cost for another platform?

[slim]

Getting something to run on an Xbox 360, a PS3 and a Wii is very hard because they are very different platforms. So while there are frameworks and tools that help get the code running on all platforms, so the differences between the hardware is less of a hassle than it used to be, it's a lot of work making the game run *well* on all platforms.

However, the engine is a small fraction of the cost of a game, especially when an existing cross-platform engine is used (although even these often get tweaked).

Model design, level design, scripting, voice acting, motion capture; all these are very significant costs, and are portable. Level scripting is usually done in a higher level language than C, and is portable across platforms.

And, of course, each company has its own approval process, with its own UI standards, etc., as well as unique hardware to be taken into account (e.g. Wiimote). What this means is that while you can reuse the core logic, level design, etc., there's still tons of work to do for each additional platform.

True enough. Xbox Achievements and so forth.

I'd still argue, though, that the reason cross-platform games tend to correlate with expensive-to-make games, is that having spend megabucks on designing a game, publishers want as many potential buyers as possible.

(The key exceptions, of course, being Sony or MS exclusives, which those companies use to increase the prestige of their platforms)

More complicated and less fun

[diskofish]

Games keep getting more and more complicated and more expensive but no more fun. I just completed Assassin's Creed over the weekend. I found the gameplay mechanic for Theif, which preceded it by over ten years, to me much more fun.

Re:More complicated and less fun

[Trepidity]

That fact makes me increasingly interested in just treating the history of games as something to mine for stuff to play. I used to have basically a 1- or 2-year game horizon: what I'm going to play this weekend was determined by choosing from the list of recent games. But now I have more like a 20-year horizon; I might play a recent game this weekend, or I might play a classic game I've heard a lot about that I haven't gotten around to experiencing myself, yet. It seems that as games get taken more seriously as a medium, instead of just throw-away entertainment, it ought to move in that direction. I mean, it's not like avid readers read only new-release best-sellers. Sometimes you do, but sometimes you read Victor Hugo or Isaac Asimov.

Even for new games, there are fortunately still a lot of less-expensive games that come out that can be innovative, and some even manage to get some decent press; World of Goo and Braid are two of the more prominent recent success stories. This year's Indie Game Festival has a lot of interesting stuff, too. Indie games might be even more vibrant than indie film is, these days.

Re:More complicated and less fun

[Kjella]

Welcome to getting older. I can't believe how easy I was to entertain when I was a teen, plus then I didn't really know the meaning of "work". It was all either fun or learning, even the grinding was just a little interlude. And every generation talks about something, like how say vinyl had more soul than CDs, or the people in costumes had more soul than CGI, and how real world makebelieve had more soul than virtual makebelieve and so on.

Each one of these megagames probably used far more skill and time on a professional writer than the computer geek who part-time doubled as gfx artist, sfx artist, composer and sometimes writer on your garage setup obscure game. I can at least say that with most old games I can have kind memories but if I start playing then many of them I get fed up because it's so simple and boring to a mind that's had another ten years of experience at figuring stuff out.

Marketing Budgets can dwarf Dev Costs

[Zeussy]

If you took at any recent AAA title game, marketing and distribution costs are huge. Apparently the marketing budget for COD:MW2 was $200 million (although that probably includes distribution costs) with development $40-50 million. According to http://www.thatvideogameblog.com/2009/11/19/modern-warfare-2s-development-budget-40-50-million/
Halo 3's was $40 million+ of marketing, similar to dev cost. GTAIV would of had similar if not more, being a multi platform title. Although wiki says the development of GTAIV was estimated to cost near $100.
A friend of mine from THQ complained that De Blob sold really well, then they blew the equivalent of profits on the marketing campaign for japan, and the game flopped there.

Flash+Java+Xbox 360+iPhone+PC?

[tepples]

if you develop for multiplatform a lot of code (AI etc...) can be shared and only things like renderer and input need multiple implementations, which can't be THAT much more work??

I know of no single language that compiles to every single bytecode. For example, say you want to publish a game on several platforms. One only runs ActionScript bytecode. Another only runs JVM bytecode. Another exclusively uses CLR bytecode (unless you're a large enough business to qualify for PowerPC instructions). Another uses ARM instructions. Another uses x86 instructions. So in what language should the developer write the physics and AI to target all platforms?

Minority of the market

[tepples]

Who cares - that's their fault.

It's Apple's fault, but it's developers' problem. This is true especially as the market share of smartphones grows at the expense of dumbphones, phoneless PDAs, and dedicated gaming devices.

It worries me that Apple's policies will end up dictating how games are written

The policies of Nintendo and Sony have long dictated how games are written: if a game is to allow multiple players to use one TV-sized monitor and multiple controllers, it needs to be for one or more consoles, not the PC (EA Sports being the exception), and therefore it needs to follow all the console rules including minimum size of business. Only recently have the majority of new TVs become able to handle the EDTV and HDTV signals that PCs produce on their VGA, DVI-D, and HDMI connectors.