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

[Pinky's Brain]

I wouldn't be surprised if half the budget on MW2 was marketing, if not more.

Re:Shouldn't be surprising

[slim]

World of Goo is a great game, but I don't think it follows that the money spent on big budget games is wasted.

To make the comparison with movies: lots of people like the low budget Clerks. But millions more like the expensive Lord of the Rings. Part of what they like is all that expensive looking grandeur. You couldn't make Lord of the Rings on Clerks' budget.

You couldn't make GTA IV on World of Goo's budget. I think there's room in this world for both games.

Re:More complicated and less fun

[Anonymous Coward]

You are also 10 years older.

It is very much like the idea that modern music sucks (the best music is always the stuff that played when we were in college), or the quote about sci-fi:

The golden age of science fiction is twelve.

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.

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.

Re:Marketing Budgets can dwarf Dev Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

"GTAIV would of had similar if not more, being a multi platform title."

God dammit! It's "would HAVE had"!

Re:Half the cost for another platform?

[laird]

Exactly. 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. For example, you can't use the same 3d models or textures on a Wii and a PS3 or Xbox 360, so you need to redo them (unless you want the PS3 and Xbox 360 to look like a Wii). 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.

no.. 200 million for marketing mw2.

[leuk_he]

The LA Times report also claims that the marketing costs of Modern Warfare 2 hit close to $200 million - a staggering figure for a video game marketing campaign.

Now choose your professions. Marketing of coding. ;)

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.