Tom Henderson - "Gears of War budget is insane. I've heard upwards of 400 Million dollars"

[konnichiwa]

JRPGfan said:

DekutheEvilClown said:

I doubt this is true. Most of these rumoured budgets are normally greatly exaggerated, and based on the absolute upper end of games. For example Concord had a development budget of $50m from ProbablyMonsters investment material. No one can say how much it ran over budget, but the idea it cost $200m with a dev team that peaked at around 150 people is pretty ludicrous.

There’s lot of game with reasonable budgets when Developers are actually being held in check:

Ghost of Yotei - $60M

Alan Wake 2 - €50m

Saros - €50m

Control -  €30m

Control: Resonant - €50m

Horizon: Zero Dawn - €45m

Returnal - significantly less than Saros

It's just a rumor, not confirmed.
It could be with marketing added in (no idea).

However if you have 200-500 developers working 7years on a project.... it does add up.

Google claims:
"An average game developer (software engineer) at Xbox (Microsoft) makes roughly $135,000 to $175,000 per year in total compensation"

Lets take the low number, then it is about ~$135,000 with say ~350 developers and ~7 years of developement..
135k x 350 x 7 years = 330,750,000  ($330m) in Salaries.

(then there is mocap, voice acting, music rights, what have you, marketing ect)

That is just napkin math from me, that is likely off.
However it has been 7 years since their last game.

A lot of them were contractors tho, a ton of devs were laid off or were gone after 1-2 years after Gears 5 and the number growed again with the scale of the game development.  Not contradicting the 400$ million tho,   just as a fan of Gears 5 and seeing so many people leave I had to point this out.

It is also something that people don't like about MS 'the contractors'