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Forums - Gaming Discussion - I need some development costs clarifications.

ShadowSoldier said:
Actually Games like Uncharted cost 20M to make
Killzone 2 costs only 25M to make but they have a 40M budget for Advertisement and Etc

Gears 1 and 2 cost about 10M to make and thats because Epic has made a shitload this gen from the Unreal engine

Halo cost 30M but had a huge cost for advertisement

and GTA cost 100M

 

 Yes, Uncharted $20M and Gears $10M, excluding marketing.

I doubt Killzone 2 only cost only $25 mill though. Doesn't Guerilla have like a +100 people development team? And they've worked on the game for over 4 years. So it should be 400 man years put into Killzone 2, which equals $40 million. 

You also said only 500,000 copies is needed for a game to break even. That might be true for HD games on average (if included not just your Call of Duty's but also your Two Worlds and Hour of Victory's) but it sure as hell ain't true for Sony published games because they cost a lot more to make.

 

 



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Gears of War is an outlier... Its cost is deceptively low as it doesn't include the megaton of man hours invested into making the Unreal Engine. Most teams have to either make an engine from scratch (expensive) or license one which costs a lot. Another possibility is adapting an older engine, but that's a lot of work too.

Epic also outsourced some work to China which most developers don't do AFAIK.

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

So does anyone know how a games $USD50 or $USD60 is split? Does anyone have any idea on the retail margins at all?