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Barozi on 08 July 2013
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osed125 said:
Barozi said:
osed125 said:

The top 10 is definitely higher. This image is old, there are definitely much more expensive games that are not there.

You have games that have costed more than $100 million to make (with the biggest exaggeration of all time which has been Star Wars the Old Republic, with $200 million total in budget). 

The image was made or updated in 2012 (The Old Republic numbers are from January 2012) so it's not that old.
What else should be on there ?

GTA V will certainly be there, but it's not out. GT6 is surely cheaper than GT5 (Polyphony said that themselves). Halo 4 maybe but even then the 10th and 9th and 8th place would be $60m.

Also from various Google research I've noticed that there are many unconfirmed numbers flying around. I would only trust the ones coming from the developers or publishers.

Kotaku says Halo 3 was $55m (that's what's in the image), Polygon says it's $30m (and another $30m advertising costs).
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/10/25/spencer-halo-4-is-microsofts-most-expensive-game/


I also don't think that Max Payne 3 had a $105m budget.
Here the salary of people in the industry:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167355/
About $80k per year,  which means that Rockstar hired 200 people for 6 1/2 years to work on Max Payne 3 or 400 people for 3 1/4 years (time between announcement and release were 3 years).

Btw. after they shipped the game 35 people worked at Rockstar Vancouver:
http://ir.take2games.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=86428&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1712961&highlight=

Salary is only one of the many things that goes into development cost, given that game took a lot of time to make (plus some delays) I don't see why the game wouldn't cost $105 million (especially given Rockstar record). 

This is the best I could find about Halo 4, it's all speculation, but Spencer said that it's not even close to anything they have made before, and they say that it might have costed $100 million (not sure if that includes marketing).

I remember someone saying that Bioshock Infinite was also very expensive, but I can't find any source.

Read that source again. It says with promotion over $100m.
Marketing costs aren't included in the development budgets.

So what else is there ? Licensing costs for the engine/music and perhaps the voice actors and motion capture actors. That's a tiny bit of the budget.