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Forums - Sales - Grand Theft Auto IV... 100 million spent? (Cost of GTAIV)

celine on 30 April 2008
disolitude said:
What this article doesn't take in to account is inflation. 70 Million for shenmue in 1998 is not 70 million in 2008. Anyone know the inflation rates for the last 10 years? Maybe Shenmue still owns this record...

 70 million figure for Shen Mue should be for chapter 1 & 2 for Dreamcast also probably include the saturn version never released ...



 “In the entertainment business, there are only heaven and hell, and nothing in between and as soon as our customers bore of our products, we will crash.”  Hiroshi Yamauchi

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disolitude on 30 April 2008
celine said:
disolitude said:
What this article doesn't take in to account is inflation. 70 Million for shenmue in 1998 is not 70 million in 2008. Anyone know the inflation rates for the last 10 years? Maybe Shenmue still owns this record...

 70 million figure for Shen Mue should be for chapter 1 & 2 for Dreamcast also probably include the saturn version never released ...


I think 70 mil is for all costs Saturn game included...no?

Man, can you imagine how things may have turne out differently if Saturn was not rushed out of the Japanese market and Shenmue was released on the system sometime in 1998. Then in 2000-2001 when a more powerful Dreamcast launched, they could have Shenmue 2 as the launch title.



tombi123 on 30 April 2008
Ail said:
Viper1 said:
Supposedly, Gone With The Wind had over a billion in domestic gross revenue taking inflation into account. Titanic did $600 million.

 

Yes but Gone with the Wind didn't have as big an international success as Titanic did, even accounting for inflation..


 Yeah but 2/3rds of the British public watched it at the cinema when it came out.



y0ungK!d on 30 April 2008

Grand Theft Auto 4 still wins even if it Shenmue was 70 million it's $90,466,842.90 with inflation. That's still less than 100 million so it was beaten if this is true.



disolitude on 30 April 2008
y0ungK!d said:
Grand Theft Auto 4 still wins even if it Shenmue was 70 million it's $90,466,842.90 with inflation. That's still less than 100 million so it was beaten if this is true.

How did you get this number and what years did you use?



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y0ungK!d on 30 April 2008
disolitude said:
y0ungK!d said:
Grand Theft Auto 4 still wins even if it Shenmue was 70 million it's $90,466,842.90 with inflation. That's still less than 100 million so it was beaten if this is true.

How did you get this number and what years did you use?


http://www.halfhill.com/inflation.html

 1998-2008



twesterm on 30 April 2008

That $100million number actually sounds too low.

It sounds high at first but take into account the game took 4 years to make and they say that they had a 100 person team (yet they have 74 artists and at least as many designers and programmers so more than 100).

So assuming that the $100million is just employee's salary then that means each employee there makes $25k/year which is way too low. The average up there is probably pretty close to California so that number should be around $50k/year (very light assumption there).

That means with 100 employee's the game should have spent $200million in salaries alone. Throw in the insane advertising campaign, overhead, and everything else and that number gets even higher.



 

disolitude on 30 April 2008
twesterm said:
That $100million number actually sounds too low.

It sounds high at first but take into account the game took 4 years to make and they say that they had a 100 person team (yet they have 74 artists and at least as many designers and programmers so more than 100).

So assuming that the $100million is just employee's salary then that means each employee there makes $25k/year which is way too low. The average up there is probably pretty close to California so that number should be around $50k/year (very light assumption there).

That means with 100 employee's the game should have spent $200million in salaries alone. Throw in the insane advertising campaign, overhead, and everything else and that number gets even higher.

Yeah but i'm sure those employees worked on other games as well...manhnt 2, Rockstar table tennis, bully...its not just GTA4 right.



FishyJoe on 30 April 2008

I bet a good chunk goes to music licensing. GTA licenses the real songs, not knock offs like most of Guitar Hero.



TheBigFatJ on 30 April 2008

MGS wouldn't have nearly GTA 4's budget, because they don't anticipate nearly GTA 4's sales. Not nearly, not ever.


So assuming that the $100million is just employee's salary then that means each employee there makes $25k/year which is way too low. The average up there is probably pretty close to California so that number should be around $50k/year (very light assumption there).

100 million divided by 100 employees is a million. Divide that by four, and you get 250,000. Not 25,000. I'm not saying there aren't other costs, i'm just pointing out that your math was wrong by a factor of 10.

Take 2 claimed their team size was about 125.