Wow that is alot cheaper than I thought it would cost.  Damn they must be rolling in the cash!!!!

Well, if they are not including any of the R&D for the engine in these games, I'd hate to see the cost to make the game where it is all lobbed on.

Personally, I think they are simply shifting costs. Granted, Gears wasn't the first game made on that engine, so its probably a moot point.

Why is it a picture of Gears 1?

I refuse to believe Gears 2 only cost $12 million.

I estimate $150,000 x 60 people x 2 years = $18 million minimum, which doesn't include engine licensing(since it's in-house) or marketing. A $18 million budget should roughly cover other small middle-ware licenses and China outsourcing though.

that would explain all the glitches shipped on the game, but i guess Epic would of been under a lot of pressure from Microsoft. i bet the 12 mill figure doesn't include all the work done from patches....

Man, EPIC made some serious dough on this. The engine development costs are seperated because it is paid for by licensing. The game development will be paid for by customer purchases. And it is probably a seperate team.

It is always nice to see good games make big profits.

in kz2 budget take into account the development a engine from scratch yet it's a better engine.

When quoting the budget for Gears I believe that the core cost of the engine development is kept seperate as something else Epic do as part of their overall business, so the budget should be less than a KZ2, etc.  I also seem to remember they didn't count the outsourcing costs, just US based development costs (but I could be wrong on that).

Uncharted was I think around $30M (I'm sure that's what I read at the time) which included research and development costs to build engine from scratch, as an example.

Also, assets can cost a lot.  A Gears game, so far as I can tell from my playtime, has a lot less textures, etc. in total than say Uncharted, so the asset creation costs will be lower, etc.

While the idea of lots of high resolution assets is nice, if you're developing enough unique assets to fill a BR vs a DVD then it's going to cost a lot more.

Lovely profit for Epic there - maybe they can sort out the persistant pop-in texture lag the damn engine seems to have.

@ reasonable, both it and its sequel will be $20m

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/uncharted-sequel-costing-usd-20-million

That probably has extra costs because they did much more (and better) VO and motion capture for the cut-scenes, and for the second one they are adding in MP