Before asking the question above to a bunch of people at this year's DICE conference, I assumed everyone would agree with me that the game industry doesn't like talking about how much games cost to make. It turns out I was mostly right, but not entirely -- some weren't aware of what I was suggesting, though almost everyone had a unique take on why things are the way they are.

Check out all the replies below, and we won't complain if you want to offer your own take in the comments at the bottom of the page. Promise.

Brian Reynolds, Zynga
"Because it's a competitive advantage. When you've spent all this time figuring out what a business model is and how to make a profit, you don't want everybody else to know how good of a business it is. You know, if it's doing really well, you don't want everybody jumping in going, 'Well they're paying so little to get so much. Let's go do that and compete with them." Or the other way if you're not doing well, you don't want all your creditors coming after you. [Laughs]"

Marc Merrill, Riot Games
"I don't know. Maybe because -- and this may be true in the games industry -- maybe because most games unfortunately don't make it. The 80/20 rule kind of applies to games, where 20% of the games have 80% of the success. People don't necessarily want to go on the record for how much they spend. I don't know. We've been pretty transparent about it, and so I don't think there's a good reason."

Don James, Nintendo
"Well in the game industry, the budget evolves. When you go into the movie industry, as I understand it, you kind of set a budget, and you're either over budget, or you're under budget, or you hit your budget. In the game industry, because it's an interactive environment and you have to continually work on the game until you get it right, until you feel it's good enough for release -- it's not too hard, it's not too easy, it's not too frustrating -- your budget's going to float around. So I think that's the reason why they don't come up."

Mike Capps, Epic Games
"I think you see a little bit more us thinking that way, because you're wanting to create the phenomenon. And you get that with an Avatar by saying how much you spent. For us, game budget in many respects in the game industry has always been the size of the E3 booth. That's always been the way you show that the publisher's really behind this title, because 'check this big booth.' So that was kind of the way we did that in the past, but I think it's got to change."

Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Software
"I think the distance between the shareholders who are publicly trading the shares of these businesses that are making videogames -- that distance between the shareholders and the decision making is really short. You know, most of the movie studios are part of larger conglomerates, and it's part of a wider network, so I think the idea of fiscal information becomes a very precious commodity to these guys, so they get nervous about talking about it. I don't care. I'll talk about stuff...

[1UP: What does Borderlands 2 cost?]

I think by the time all is said and done, we're somewhere in the 30-35 million dollar range. We're still going, so we'll see what happens, but yeah the publisher took a lot of risk in that. What's neat about this is because I take my own risk too, nobody gets to know how much Take-Two risked on that."

Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward
"I don't know why they're so secretive. I think the development cost is less sensitive than the marketing dollars. I don't think anyone wants to be perceived as wasting marketing dollars. I think right now, you know, especially in the games we work on -- we make Call of Duty -- I think we have some absurdly large budgets that could easily be cut down. So I would be secretive about it because it's embarrassing to have a giant budget in game development. I think in game development you can be modest, and you should be modest wherever you can."

Tim Sweeney, Epic Games
"Well geez. Epic has always been a very lean and mean company, so we've been fairly open about our budgets. I think a lot of companies have been applying brute force methods to game development, and I think they end up with a budget that in many cases might be considered embarrassing... We've generally said that the first Gears of War cost somewhere between 10 and 12 million dollars to develop. I couldn't tell you the most recent numbers with Gears of War 3 -- it's a significantly larger number because we had a bigger team working for a longer period of time."

Michael Condrey, Sledgehammer Games
"I don't know why companies may not be transparent about it. For us, we put a lot of time and energy into these games, and the focus is on the quality of the game. Triple-A blockbuster titles are expensive; I'll tell you that. I hear quotes out there ranging from 50 to 200 million; I personally don't know what other companies are doing. I know what we spent. It was a lot. [Laughs] I'll tell you that. So I don't know. What we talk about is the game and that second to second experience, and let Activision talk about the numbers I guess."

Matthew Lee Johnston, PopCap
"From my own personal perspective, and in my past I've done a lot of external development -- now I'm doing a lot of internal development at PopCap -- when it's internal, you sort of have a culture that just supports great game development and you're not really exposing a lot of those details to every single member of the team. For a specific reason -- you don't want them to be focused internally on the cost of development; you want them to be focused on making a great game. So I think that can go pretty high up, and I think exposing those details to people sometimes when they're creative is a bad idea."

Amir Rao, Supergiant Games
"I can speak to it as a small independent developer. We put our own savings in to make Bastion, and a lot of times people ask us, 'How much did it cost to make?' And usually they're asking it from the perspective of, 'How much money do I need to make a game like that?' And I think it's really not instructive of what it actually takes to make a game if you just fund a game with enough to live out of a house, which is what we did for two years. The second thing is, publishers often want to know how much a game costs, and I think part of avoiding the answer is that if it didn't cost you very much, you don't want to say that it didn't cost you very much because you don't want to appear cheap. And if it did cost you a lot, you may not want to say it cost you a lot because maybe the quality wasn't where you want it to be. So there's almost no way you can win, I think, by answering the budget question."

David Jaffe, Eat Sleep Play
"Are they really [secretive in the game industry]? I wasn't aware. I'm so I guess on the inside of that -- I know what games cost, so.

[1UP: If I was to ask, would you tell me?]

I wouldn't because it's not my place to, but not because I wouldn't want to tell you. I would love to tell you. Umm I don't know. I could probably speculate, and it would probably be some right, some wrong. Maybe it's that they're public companies? Though the movie studios are public too. I would have no problem with people knowing how much the games we make cost and what it means to break even. Why not? I don't care."

Tomonobu Itagaki, Valhalla Game Studios
"It's not cool to reveal such information. That's all."

Danny Bilson, THQ
"Actually, I didn't know that we were secretive or I might have told you the budget, but now you've warned me and I guess I better be secretive... But I originally came from the film business, and we'd usually inflate them because we were sort of telling the audience 'look how much we've invested in you.' And that was always kind of my opinion. If Itagaki-san and I were making a very expensive game -- which we are -- it's all good for the consumer, because we're spending all that money to give them a great experience."

Ted Price, Insomniac Games
"I think it's harder to pin down for games, because today there are so many different types of development processes, and there are so many different types of games that are successful. You don't have to necessarily spend lots of money to have a success... I [also] think it's somewhat irrelevant. When you use budgets to try to justify a game's quality, it's a slippery slope. What's important is the idea and the execution, not necessarily the amount of money it made. Of course, money's important, because there are limits to what you can do based on the money you have and the size of the team, but when you start comparing dollars it gets away from the core question, which is 'what makes the game great."

Todd Howard, Bethesda
"I would just give you my own opinion on why I wouldn't want to. This isn't like corporate policy or why anybody else does it. I don't want you to change your expectation of Skyrim with that number. I want you to look at it as, 'It's 60 bucks, the rest of these games are 60 bucks, how do you feel about what we gave you.' It doesn't matter what we spent, and I don't want that to flavor what anybody thinks about the game." 

Source: http://www.1up.com/news/why-game-budgets-secretive

Interesting article. They are more secretive than i thought. I guess just big games like GT5, GTA franchise let their budgets out.

I can't believe borderlands 2 is gonna cost 50 million dollars, it might not even make a profit at that cost!

He said 30-35 million so where are you getting that 50m from ?
30 million isn't that much to be honest. Probably average budget or for a higher profile HD game.


OT: I totally agree with the Infinity Ward guy. How much did they spent on MW2 ? I think it was 60 or 65 million and around 200m including the ads. You would think that a game with almost the same graphics as the previous one and a campaign that lasts 4-5 hours, plus some new multiplayer maps wouldn't cost that much.

Oh, my bad. Still, $35 million for game which will probably only sell 6 million across all platforms it still high, and doesnt even include advertising! Lets say they make $20 per game. $20 x 6,000,000 = 120,000,000!

Oh, I counted wrong...

Becasue they do not want others to know how much cash they make. If people knew it would dispel this whole poor developer myth. From what i have seen and read the games industries is huge and still growing and will be the biggest entertainment market. Its also probably that a few people at the top of dev teams rake in the cash and rest get shorthanded.

While they lose money on quite a few games, I don't think they want people to realize the incredible amount of money that there is potential to make on the good games. The last thing studios want is for more people that they have to compete against. This will make it harder for their game to do good.

I liked Jaffes answer and the Gearbox guy's answer and of course The King's answer.

They don't kiss and tell each other! Conspiracy!!

I think the industry still has that element of a game being low budget instantly means it's bargain bin quality. With the digital networks making games that defy that it's turning around, but historically the games industry has had bargain games, made on bargain budgets, that are general shovalware. Films sort of don't have that connection so much, you get indie films that breakthrough and stuff - I think films have just matured more in that regard and that games will in the end.

Take 2 and Activison were both happy to boast about their budgets for GTAIV and COD... so I think any number thats big they're happy to get out there - provided they know the game isn't gonna tank, at least.