Others UP!

[Reasonable]

Slimebeast said:

KZ2 budget and revenue:

Dev cost:
100 team average x 4 years x $100,000 = $40 million.

Add some outsourcing costs (some AI, perhaps some texture work, some of the sound & music/orchestratingm voice actors etc) ~ $10 million.
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= ~$50 million

Marketing (hard to estimate):
~$30-40 million?
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total expenses: $80-90 milion


Each game copy sold generates $30.

So it would need to sell 2.67-3 million to break even.

Early numbers indicate a 900,000-1 million copies opening week, which means lifetime sales of 4 million.

4 million generates $120 million. So, pretty much guaranteed to make at least a lil profit.

I'm sure KZ2 was expensive, but I doubt they've paid 100 people full time for 4 years.  It would be more normal to have an flexible team that ramped up/down over time hitting a peak when full production was in place.

However as ever its too simple to look at things in isolation.  If you have an engine in place to use/adapt, as Epic did with Gears, your costs will be less, if you build an engine from scratch (as Epic had to years back with the original Unreal, which was 5 years in development if I remember correctly) then it's going to cost you more.

But of course once you have the engine, subsequent games become cheaper to produce and over time you make more money.  KZ2 looks like it will be a hit, and with the engine now in place KZ3 should be a less expensive affair to get out the door.

This is why so many devs are attracted to sourcing engines in the first place, to avoid that initial expense - the down side is that unless the developer is good/has an original concept you get many 'meh' games on the same engine.  Personally I find more than half U3 based games 'meh' which is not a knock on the engine, but that its rarely properly exploited and serves as a low cost way to bash a game out.

I'm pretty sure Uncharted cost around $30 Million to develop, with ND stating a lot of that was due to having to build everything from scratch essentially (although actors and mocap CGI scenes probably didn't cut costs either!).  I would guess KZ2 cost around that or more to develop - however as with Gears its not all about one throw of the dice, but making some money on the initial investment and getting a franchise in place where each release should be more profitable than the last.

The advertising amount you have seems very high though - I know the game has been hyped on the internet, etc. but I've seen nothing for the game remotely like Halo 3 advertising or big budget movie advertising so tens of millions in advertising seems unlikely I would think.