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EpicRandy on 25 July 2020
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eva01beserk said:
EpicRandy said:

500M for destiny franchise was including expected cost of infras support for 10 years and marketing cost.

Rokstar GTA 500M budget for GTAV is far from the norm and was only possible because there were basicaly no risk in doing so.

I'll say 40M to 100M (including marketing) is probably where the vast majority of AAA is.

Marketing cost could also be dramatically lowered with Gamepass, I hardly ever saw commercial for netflix content. Investment into other project might just be a better marketing investment in the long run than pure marketing investment in this model.

I say 3-4 AAA/year is not out of questions, far from it. All will depends on mass adoptions of the service, right now it's 10M+ which should bring about 1B$+ in revenue/year depending on how revenue are split between AAA, AA, third party deals and operating cost (which I doubt are that high) it could already be enough 3-4 AAA.

The key here is how Microsoft will bring Game pass from a 10m subribers to 20m, 50m, 100m and for this aspect the Showcase give a great insight. It basically tell Microsoft will not shy away from investment into Gamepass.

True, with the right number of subs it can happen and even more than they promised. But to get there you first need the content to bring the subs, but need the subs to bring the content and so on. So take a massive loss now, or they have been taking a massive loss already. Cant know, they wont say.

Well how much do you think the average movie cost? Its only the marvels and so on that cost hundreds of millions. The average movie is also under $100m. How about the average show? I cant say that I know. After a quick search I saw it cost 2-3m per episode. seasons are between 12-24 episodes so it could cost 24-36m on a 12 episode season. the first season of the witcher cost $200m. thats one of the highest if im not mistaken. So the average show and movie still cost what the average AA game cost. ANd AAA cost could be around big blockbuster movies and big shows like the witcher. 

Well I did a little dig on the subject. 

If this hold any water the number of games with a budget over 50M (combined production + Marketing) is extremely limited. it is not exhaustive as information on the subject seems to be scarce. I think we could easily add Death Stranding, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us 2 and probably a handfull of other recent AAA.

This tell us the average budget of AAA during 7th gen was between 10-20M and assess that the cost during 8 gen have greatly increased but don't give specific figure. Still we can extrapolate that a 100M+ budget is atypical and must be generaly reserved to sequel of extremly popular title the likes of TLoU.

the-numbers.com list 400+ movie with budget of 100M+ and this is just production cost not factoring in marketing cost. 

So I think it's fair to say the average movie cost probably around 2x maybe more than the average AAA game even without factoring their marketing cost.

If I were to guess I would say a 250-350M well managed budget should be more than enough to finance 4 AAA/year. So I don't think Microsoft is that far off with current Gamepass userbase.

You also have to take into account that Gamerpass and upcoming XCloud is a way for Microsoft to drastically reduce the entry cost to AAA - AA gaming. If played well it's probably the best shot Microsoft will ever have to finaly unlock emerging market. And if they could tap into this market that's certain to be a game changer.

Last edited by EpicRandy - on 25 July 2020