| the-pi-guy said: Moriarty claimed that the game by itself cost $400 million, without any of those extra costs. |
Correct. Moriarty said it was $400m in development costs.
Development costs does not include acquisition costs. You acquire something, you're acquiring an asset, what you believe that assets value adds to your overall business, it's not seen as money lost (unless of course, you end up shutting down the studio a year later...Lol) or said asset devalues itself by a notable sum.
$200m according to Kotaku is seemingly $200m across most of the development which is 2018 - 2024. IIRC According to Colin, Sony added $200m after they acquired Firewalk and it had already had $200m spent on it before Sony acquired Firewalk. So $200m in around 5 years and then Sony added $200m in a single year which seems unlikely.
Now could it be $400m if we for some reason add acquisition costs? Maybe? But that's what I said when the rumour came out at the time, that it could be believable if it was including acquisition costs for some reason. But you don't include acquisition costs in development costs, Lol. The cost of the IP is also irrelevant, that'll be under acquisition costs and the IP ain't going to be worth shit considering it wasn't even an established IP.
So all that being said, it's $200m across most of its development according to this and Sony wasn't funding it for some of those years (I believe Sony picked up publishing in 2021?) so for roughly 3 years that would have been ProbablyMonsters funding it, not Sony. All we're missing is the marketing costs which I can't imagine were any higher than $50m considering how shit the marketing was.
So development costs + marketing I imagine is somewhere in the region of $250-$300m.
