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Forums - Gaming Discussion - How much does is cost to make a video game?

I was just wondering this because I was on Wikipedia and it said that the budget for Final Fantasy VII was $45 million, that seems like alot of money, so what I wanted to know is if Final Fantasy VII was just really expensive to make back then or was that normal?

And do you know what the cost of any other games are (I just like numbers), and what does the average game cost to make today, and or a AAA game (like Metal gear solid 4 or Final Fantasy XIII).

Thanks

Edit: Damn typo



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Creating high quality assets for animated movies has always been insanely expensive (similar to why HD games are so expensive today) with how many cutscenes there was in Final Fantasy VII it isn't surprising that it was so expensive.



Don't always take what the wiki tells you as fact.



Depends on the platform, but even then the range can be quite large. GTAIV was estimated to cost $100M, while Gears of War was estimated to cost only $10M.



100 BILLION dollars.



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BenKenobi88 said:
100 BILLION dollars.

 



I dont think that its correct ... FFVII did cots more but even Gears of War had a little over 10 million . Shore GTA4 had reportadly 100 million , but thats an open world mamoth :P



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twesterm said:
Don't always take what the wiki tells you as fact.

It uses sources, so it´s quite reliable.



1 jillion dollars.



Arcturus said:

Depends on the platform, but even then the range can be quite large. GTAIV was estimated to cost $100M, while Gears of War was estimated to cost only $10M.

That $10 million didn't include any of the costs of the engine I believe.

Anyways, pretty much the only answer is there isn't a concrete amount.  In most cases extensive FMV's will jack up the cost (i.e. Final Fantasy).  Not sure if they are completely accurate, but these are the numbers I have seen for the FF games.

FFVII : 26 million
FFVIII : 30 million
FFIX : 38 million
FFX : 40 million
FFXI : 12 million