| Munkeh111 said: How the hell did they do it so cheaply? I suppose they did have the engine pre-made, and I read they do outsource to China, but still that is cheap. Uncharted 2 is costing $20m to make, but I suppose the engine refinements are included in that cost, in Gears of War 2, I assume engine costs are incorporated at all because they must have a dedicated Unreal Engine team. @ squilliam, but what about the marketing, I still have the MadWorld song stuck in my head |
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. 
Try to be reasonable... its easier than you think...
