Videogame budgets through the years..

[Andrespetmonkey]

RolStoppable said:

Andrespetmonkey said:

It doesn't seem like graphical fidelity is a huge factor... Gears cost half as much as Lost Planet, Crisis cost less than Crackdown. Beyond marketing, the number of developers, and time spent on the project, is there anything else that significantly influences the budget?

That's because Epic Games didn't factor in the costs for creating their Unreal Engine 3 that Gears of War ran on. The same should hold true for Crytek and Crysis. The creation/licensing of an engine doesn't come cheap.

Good point, but you can still use third party engines to create graphically amazing games. E.g. Batman arkham asylum running on UE3, which I'm assuming didn't have an especially large budget (I would guess $20m tops) because it wouldn't make business sense, and looking around the web the consensus seems to be that the UE3 license is less than $1 million.