A new house. A boat. A 3 or 4 really great vacations. On-call office masseuse.

E.g. Really nice salaries for everyone on the project.

Isn't Sony footing most of the bill for that though.

Less than 5 minutes in the video they say 'Planetside 2 can have thousand of players at once on PS4'.... Planetside 2 is not released yet on PS4. I even checked the PS store right now because it would be possible that I have missed it but nop...no Planetside 2..

Bull article. as everyone already said. The money was the investment of Activision for 10 years incl. Marketing, Development Destiny 1, 2 etc and/or all DLC's! So you can see how stupid some people are, only trying to bash on games/consoles just because of the clicks it will give their website!! Really I'm really getting very sad about these kind of reviews, I'm glad I don't check reviews before playing my games and mostly check reviews from friends and play demo's etc. Because this is this Review is really very very sad!

the is nothing massively-online about it. People who call it an MMO show how little they know about the game. It is basically a hub game that links various maps together and puts people in a lobby for each. The most I have seen in a lobby is like 20 or something. Not MMO. Just a new take on the "lobby" system, and a good one at that.

As others have said.. The $500 million was over a 10 year period and included marketing, DLC, and probably at least 2 more games in that time.. It is NOT for just his game.

Exactly. It's kind of like a varsity-team AA title got a AAAA marketing push and hype. It's a rough-looking cross-gen FPS full of emptiness and mediocrity, polished up with respectable art direction.

I hope they actually invest in a decent engine for the next entry, but they'll probably ride this thing for years before making any real upgrades. If it was 60fps, then some of it could be forgiven, but it's a pretty ugly game to be 30fps. The models during character creation should be possible IN GAME if they actually optimized it for 8g consoles instead of cross gen.

God cross-gen is cancer. At least when a game is aimed high on cross-gen it can look pretty decent. BF4 looks next-gen, this looks like an up-rezzed 360 title all the way. But the best will be just NOT having 7g versions at all, and using engines/tech specific to 8g consoles. Drive Club looks like it belongs in 2014, Destiny looks like something that could have come in 2008. Hell Halo 3 and 4 are more impressive in many respects.

Most of that probably went into pay for the developers, artist and outside talent.

The first reference to Destiny was in 2009 so development probably was started then, but it was a side job done by a few people. The game didn't go into "full" development until 2011. So two-or-three people proablly worked on it from 2009-to-2011, and then the full team from that point forward.

Not to mention that the 500 million was a figure dropped by Bobby Kotick and latter denied by bungie. So it probably was the estimated budget Activision was willing to give them at the time. (Wikipedia acticle on Bungie)

But back to make quick and dirty figures. 2-to-3 people making around 80k a year (gamasutra). That would be 160-to-240k a year for two years so 320k-to-480k during that time.

Now Bungie has about 160 employees, for the next three years they work on the game August 2011-to-August 2014. That is about 3.9 million during that time. This is just for the staff, not for any equipment they needed, outside work they needed done.. So I'm guessing the actual development cost is the range of 100 million-to-150 million. We will probably find that out when they have their financials covered at Activision's End of Year.

at 31.00 they start to talk about a girl at gamestop who says the game will live 10 year and they laugh with her... sigh..

Gamedevs work mostly with freelancers... Story writers/music composers etc will not work three full years most of the staff will not;.