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Forums - Sony - Uncharted's budget was...

Bodhesatva on 22 February 2008

As a side note, Phil, you said this in your last post:

I never asked for statistics on development costs for anything other than the 360 or PS3.

In your penultimate post, you said this:

If your point is that the PS3 is expensive to develop for, even relative to it's[sic] competition, then your point may not be moot, but you've failed to give evidence for your claim.

So you are incorrect: you specifically and directly requested evidence of the relative production costs between a PS3/360 game and other platforms.



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krik on 22 February 2008
DOATS1 said:
if $20 million is expensive, then what the hell is microsoft doing payin $50 million for episodic content??

 Microsoft got screwed on that one... ouch



PSN ID: krik

Optimistic predictions for 2008 (Feb 5 2008): Wii = 20M, PS3 = 14M, X360 = 9.5M

 

Griffin on 22 February 2008

I'm pretty sure the Top Nintendo games cost 20mil aswell. I've heard reports before that SMG was 20mil, i have no doubt the other big Nintendo games cost over12mil to make.



Zucas on 22 February 2008
Dolla Dolla said:
20 mil is cheap now?

Yea that's what I was thining.  Since when is $20 million seen as cheap haha. 



phil on 22 February 2008
Bodhesatva said:
phil said:
Bodhesatva said:
phil said:

Bodhesatva said:
phil said:
Bodhesatva said:

This is a classic debating tactic.

First, you insist that your "opponent" has claimed some ridiculously high (or low) statistic.

Then, you show that the actual value of that statistic is lower than the ridiculous claim.

"Some people claim that over a million people die each year due to gun related violence in the US. In reality, it's less than two hundred thousand!"

 

 

This makes it look your figure is actually low, when it's only low in comparison to some ridiculously high figure.

I don't think any reasonable person here thought that games were averaging 40 million, just that some of the higher end games did cost that much (such as Killzone2 and MGS4). I honestly don't know of anyone who thought this was the norm.

20 Million is very high, and puts the given estimates for copies needed to break even right where we've heard they are for higher end games: 700-1000k units. Sounds about right to me, and only further cements my perception that the PS3 is, indeed, very expensive to develop for.


Here's the problem: you aren't actually quoting any real statistics EITHER. All you're doing is saying "well, it's 2x the cost of development of a last generation game." Well no friggin crap. And it cost more to develop on PS2 than it did for PS1. Was it double the cost, I dunno, but logically, it's more.

So, if you're terribly interested in intellectual honesty, how about, instead of saying that you think it simply must be expensive, give us some statistics to back your point up, such as budgets for games of comparable quality for the PS3/360.


You seem to have missed my point.

Another classic debate tactic... someone calls you on something and you go back on it and say that isn't what you meant. I suspect a strained parsing of your own words is to come.

If your point is that developing a game on the PS3 is expensive for mere mortals, than your point is moot, because everyone already knew that. The same probably applies to every video game system on the planet. If your point is that the PS3 is expensive to develop for, even relative to it's competition, then your point may not be moot, but you've failed to give evidence for your claim.

If those aren't your points, please enlighten me.


This isn't what you asked for in the last post -- you asked me to provide evidence of other PS3/360 games. Now, you're asking me to provide evidence of games for other systems.

That is my point.

http://www.nintendolife.com/articles/2006/08/12/red_steel_development_costs

Red Steel, largely assumed to be the most expensive third party Wii game yet produced (in the same way we assume MGS4 and FFXIII are the PS3's most expensive games) cost 12.75 million to produce. If the most expensive Wii game costs slightly more than half an average PS3 game (the most expensive ones, such as MGS4 and FFXIII, reportedly breach 40 million), then it's quite l likely that the Wii averages less than half -- I was just being generous.

http://tech.commongate.com/post/Wii_Development_costs_a_quarter_to_half_compared_to_PS3_360/
http://www.gamespot.com/wii/driving/cars/news.html?sid=6149154

Here, THQ's president states that Wii development is 1/4 - 1/2 the cost of PS3/360 development.

There are plenty others, if you need it, but this isn't something that's typically challenged because so many publishers have spoken openly about it. Here's a few more tangentially related articles:

Development costs are crazy, acording to EA.

Costs on Sony/Microsoft platforms leading to "creative failure," labeled "innovation killers" due to high costs.

 


I never asked for statistics on development costs for anything other than the 360 or PS3. I had 2 points:

a) Probably all consoles have been expensive by the standards of normal people. Note that this is the only point at which I mentioned anything other than 360/PS3, and that I never asked for statistics at all.

b) If your point is that 360/PS3 development is more than everyone else, don't expect to be thought of as a genius for pointing it out, since we all know this is true.

 


Then you really did miss my point. My point wasn't that Uncharted is expensive for a PS3/360 game, because the original poster wasn't making that point. I was suggesting that this only further evidences that PS3/360 games -- in general, not just Uncharted in particular -- are expensive to make relative to other platforms, which was the original poster's point. That is the point I was responding to, and the point you seem to have missed.

Which leads to the second bolded section. Apparently, it isn't obvious to everyone that 360/PS3 development is expensive, because the original poster said, in the original post:

"So all those naysayers that keep saying that PS3 games are too expensive can stop talking shit now"

Right in the original post. It got its own line, no less, to emphasize its significance. So this is a little unfair, yes? Apparently when people make stupid claims, I'm not allowed to refute them, because obviously everyone already knows that they're stupid and I should stop wasting everyone's time by proving the obvious. Clearly.


"Too expensive" and "more expensive than the Wii" are two entirely different things.  You didn't address "too expensive."  You only addressed "more expensive than everyone else."  I agree with you that it's more expensive than everyone else  Additionally, I reckon you'd have a hard time claiming that $20 million is too much for Uncharted when Red Steel cost almost $13 million.  Especially considering that Uncharted is widely regarded as a good game to Red Steel's mediocre and that Red Steel looks like a game that could have run on the previous generation of hardware(who's development costs you have pegged at $10 million).



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tombi123 on 22 February 2008

phil don't quote the whole conversation, delete the first few paragraphs at least.



DOATS1 on 22 February 2008
phil said:

"Too expensive" and "more expensive than the Wii" are two entirely different things.  You didn't address "too expensive."  You only addressed "more expensive than everyone else."  I agree with you that it's more expensive than everyone else  Additionally, I reckon you'd have a hard time claiming that $20 million is too much for Uncharted when Red Steel cost almost $13 million.  Especially considering that Uncharted is widely regarded as a good game to Red Steel's mediocre and that Red Steel looks like a game that could have run on the previous generation of hardware(who's development costs you have pegged at $10 million).


do you have to include the other posts in your quote?




phil on 22 February 2008
Bodhesatva said:

As a side note, Phil, you said this in your last post:

I never asked for statistics on development costs for anything other than the 360 or PS3.

In your penultimate post, you said this:

If your point is that the PS3 is expensive to develop for, even relative to it's[sic] competition, then your point may not be moot, but you've failed to give evidence for your claim.

So you are incorrect: you specifically and directly requested evidence of the relative production costs between a PS3/360 game and other platforms.


No, I was asking for statistics of PS3 dev costs vs 360 dev costs.  The 360 is the PS3's competition that I was referring to.

shams on 22 February 2008
krik said:

Uncharted's budget was $20M... I was pretty amazed too. Such an amazing game built from scratch (zero lines of code from PS2 days), new tool chain, lots of motion capture studio time, real actors, 1 year pre-production and 2 years production, custom sound track, etc. Sounds cheap for so many thing but the lead designer confirmed that $20M was all.

So all those naysayers that keep saying that PS3 games are too expensive can stop talking shit now ;)

PS: Lair was more expensive than $20M, rofl. Pretty ironic, Naughty Dog rocks.

WTF?

20m is an *extremely* expensive game. Note that this doesn't include advertising, marketing or promotion - does it?

Give me 20m, and three years and I could *definitely* deliver Uncharted - absolutely no doubt.

Its typical for marketing budget to match development budget - so 40m for the title in total. And even if Sony made $40 US "raw" per unit sold (and they wouldn't - be closer to $25..$30) - that's 1m units sold to break even.

Ouch. 

...

According to VG, its sold 1.21m - so it might *just* be hitting break even point. And if Uncharted struggles to break even / make a good profit - what does that say for the average PS3 developer?

(note - when you take into account shipments, its probably shipped 1.5m - 2.0m units...by profit per shipped unit is closer to $20-$25 / unit) 

Carnival games (not a great comparison really) has sold 1.1m.  As its one platform, I doubt dev cost + marketing exceeded 3-4m (definitely less than 10m).

If they make $20US per unit - that's 22m of revenue (based on sales - of course shipments are higher). 

...

And as for something like Mario Party 8... at almost 5m sales (6m shipped?), and considering its a Ninty published title - might be looking at 200m of revenue, on 10-15m dev + marketing costs (if not only 5m). 

 



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phil on 22 February 2008
DOATS1 said:
phil said:

"Too expensive" and "more expensive than the Wii" are two entirely different things. You didn't address "too expensive." You only addressed "more expensive than everyone else." I agree with you that it's more expensive than everyone else Additionally, I reckon you'd have a hard time claiming that $20 million is too much for Uncharted when Red Steel cost almost $13 million. Especially considering that Uncharted is widely regarded as a good game to Red Steel's mediocre and that Red Steel looks like a game that could have run on the previous generation of hardware(who's development costs you have pegged at $10 million).


do you have to include the other posts in your quote?


I do it to keep context.  If people don't like it, I'll stop.