"We heard and confirmed that some state of the art engines such as Doom, Unreal or Cry engines will set you back at least $400.000.

The price really depends on the customer but it goes around this number. The engine is the first step in game development and it is usually cheaper to buy a state of the art engine, rather than making one on your own.

It takes years to develop a good engine and smaller developers and bigger publishers are just making the move and buying these engines, that lets them make some great looking games.

Developers also needs at least two years to finish the game, and time to market is really critical point as you want to catch the momentum of the pre-Xmas shopping spree, especially if you have a highly anticipated title.

We can only say we salute all developers and engineers that make games and hardware that we need, as life would be boring without you guys. Thank you. "

Linky

According to Fuddyzilla the cost is $400,000 for a game engine. This doesn't make sense to me, I thought they were much much more expensive than that. There has to be some other catch like a % of revenue/profit going to the engine developers or expensive technical support or something.

If Epic has 30 engine sales, that would be 12,000,000 in revenue strictly speaking which doesn't make sense as they would have earned 10* that amount just from Gears of War 1.

Silicon Knights payed $750k to use the unreal engine, so $400k seems pretty cheap. It's also probably cheaper than running a dev team to create a bespoke state of the art engine.

Of course it makes sense. They go for bigger prices too.

There's most likely a fixed cost and % on royalties.

400k look like the fixed cost.
The % on royalties is probably low though..

Thats what I was thinking...

But it does lend credence to the statement that Lost Odyssey made its money back and then some if the engines are so cheap. In fact perhaps we need to revise the generally accepted costs of HD game development.

Im curious did Blue Dragon use the Unreal engine or something cheapish from last gen? It doesn't seem that graphically demanding, it looks like it could have been ported straight from the Wii - Im not complaining, im just interested thats all.

Yeah but they save that more money with dev costs and time. Thats why Epic cares so much about there unreal engine. GOW was built to show what it can do. Once EA took over the quake engine everyone was looking for another engine to use.

Blue Dragon was a Mistwalker engine.

Companies pay to license the tech, so there's a good chance there's an agreement of an upfront cost and royalty fees.

Does Nintendo ever buy other engines?

It's typical business practice.

The company I work for sells modelling engines ( maths engines for the noobs :P) to CAD software companies and that's the way our business is set up...

In that way Epic shares the risks with the developers using its engine. The more copies they sell the more money Epic gets back... ( which makes development costs raise slightly as a game sells more but it's such a small percentage the impact on the company bottomline is small). If a game developed on Unreal engine flops, Epic really doesn't get back that much money....

I wonder what the costs for development are then... Since a lot of the game design/art elements/engines can be reused, for example if Halo 3 cost $25 million to develop what would Halo 4 cost?