E.T. was a big deal in 1982. It was the biggest movie of the year and a cultural phonomenon. Although the cost to secure the rights may seem outlandish, it makes business sense when you add up the cost of development and distribution. Games back then were typically made by one or two people. The development time was no more than a few months and in E.T.'s case, a few weeks. Given the low development budget of games back in 1982, how much games sold for (not too different from today's cost), what Atari expected to sell, and the fact that Atari was both the publisher and developer of the game meant that E.T. was going to be a huge money maker.

There were of course problems. One, Atari didn't give a damn about quality and two, even though E.T. was a powerful license, it wasn't a good property to base a game off of.

true.. the UE3 is listed at 40 million.. I'm guessing the half life 2 number is with the creation of the enigine..

I thought I was going to see something that blew me away. Show the budget of a rockstar game. If it did'nt cost at least 200 million,then I don't care.

Now it begs the question: where are the Nintendo games?

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.

They didn't include FF7 on the list? One of the most expensive to develop games. Anyways, here's another site if you want to look at other known costs.

http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Most_expensive_video_games

You can ignore manufacturing costs which have also decreased over time.

Pixie dust magic doesn't come in dollars..

I can't believe how expensive some games were. How could anyone greenlight them?

And the other side is true, there are games that look unbeliavable cheap for the gems they were.

Also, 2005 Guitar Hero - $1.7 million, 2007 Rock Band - $20 million. I wonder how much of those were just for licenses of the songs. Probably most of them.

Some of those seem really low, like Gears.

Had no idea games like Sleepign Dogs and Homefront would cost so much. Really tough making a new IP work, I see why sequels are so much relied on these days.

In the almost 40 years that Nintendo has been a gaming company I don't think they have shared any of their development costs, they are extremely secret with that for some reason.