| zarx said: The first Crysis game had a budget of $22m, it went on to sell 3.5 million units mostly at a budget price and was profitable. Crysis 3 has a budget around three times bigger according to Crytek and that is without marketing. It's break even is likely somwhere around 2.5 million units. Crysis 2 managed almost 3 million units according to VGChartz not counting PC digital sales. CoD Modern Warfare 2 had a budget of an estimated $40-50m plus over $200m in marketing making it's break even point more than 7 million units but CoD games sell tens of millions and brings in $billions each year so they can afford it. Some analysts have estimated that GTA 5 has a development budget is around $137m and will likely have a marketing budget to match. Skyrim had a total budget of development plus marketing of $85m giving it a 2.5m unit break even. Darksiders 2 had a 2 million unit break even etc. These kinds of budgets aren't even new Final Fantasy 7 aparently cost $45m back in the day which ajusted for inflation is $64.23 million which is more than FF XIII with a $50-60m budget. AAA games are bloody expensive http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Most_expensive_video_games. A barebones Wii U port aparently costs ~$1m which is around 30k units at full price $60 not counting marketing etc, but more importantly means valuable man hours that may be better spent on other projects. |
A 2.5 M for Crysis isn't much of a problem. But the high development costs of this game are counting the costs to develop the engine, so they got some money when licensing the engine. Crysis is more like a tech demo to sell their engine and with the US$ 1.2 M basic price (at least in the last data I saw), any license sold is a solid revenue. And looking at the list of CryEngine games (that had a solid grow with version 3 compared to CryEngine 2), they got 19 games made with their engine, that would be around solid US$ 22 M in revenue.
Of course, they have cheaper licenses for indies and even a model that you got the license for free and they grab 20% of the total revenue, but I don't think that many indies would use something as complex as CryEngine (Unity is a cheaper and much more easy to develop for that CryEngine or Unreal), so we can assume that they got something around US$ 15 M to US$ 22 with the engine only.
Edit: I found this guy saying that the US$ 1.2 M price isn't accurate, but he didn't posted any value, so the real cost could be different and probably we will only know it if CryTek makes an official statement.
