Long time lurker here, I think you guys are genius so I'm asking you these questions.

1.What's the cost of an average HD title?

2.What's the cost of an high budget HD title?

3.What's the cost of an high budget Wii title?

These are my guesses.

1. 30 Million

2. 60 million

3. 10 million

Can someone tell me the cost of developing games on each console please?

lurk moar.

Your Wii number may be on the mark, but the HD titles are way too much. Here's a graph from Factor 5, should give you an idea:

Some really high budget games will go far above, like GTA4 or MGS4, but those don't really count - hell, Shenmue cost something like $50mil to make, and that was on the Dreamcast.

There are many factors.

1) The size of the team.
2) The amount of development time.
3) The size of the game.
4) The technology being used to create the game.
... and much more.

It's hard to average it out because that average probably would reflect very little true information. A game developed by Nintendo and a game developed by Atlus certainly wouldn't cost anywhere near the same amount.

Off topic but I have a question. Does anyone remember how much Too Human cost? Wasn't it something ridiculous like 90 million or something?

No problem with the lurking part but you didn't answer my question.

There are too many factors:

1) The scope of the game
2) The visuals of a game
3) The engine for the game
4) The complexities of bringing said game to the market

Each one can adversely effect the budget. It really depends on what your looking for. A HD "blockbuster" will cost around $20-25m in "most" cases, and expects to sell no less than 1m units to be profitable. There are many scaled back ventures from that kind of investment.

And having said that, a key factor is your staffing - If you have a good staff (or a cheap staff), you can get away with some very good things.

Example: Gears of War vs. Red Steel.

Both games cost the EXACT same amount of money. Guess which one looked better and sold more? It's weird to think that Gears of War only cost $10m to bring to the market, but indeed it did. Why? Epic made UE3, and was incredibly familiar with the process of bringing a game to fruition on the system, so much of the assets were already there, just waiting to be transformed into an uber-game.

And budgets don't always determine success. Braid was made for XBLA on a budget of around $500,000 including everything, and made it's entire budget back in around 2 weeks....And has turned Jonathan Blow into a millionare in a matter of weeks. It's all about taking advantage of what you can on the system of your choice: I am sure that the makers of Game Party and Carnival Games are very excited about the price vs. performance of those 2 said games.

@ cOrd
Pretty charts, thank you. The cost of making a game might be higher at the start of the generation, since many game engines are being made for middleware usage.

@ chasmatis I don't know the cost, but it has been in development for as long as the PS1 has been around.

gears doesn't include unreal 3 development cost in it.

red steel was built from the scratch for the wii, and considering the wii mote it require to get used to the new technology.

game like metal gear solid 4 does, final fantasy xiii, and gta4.

also even in the ps2 era have one of the most expensive game ever made.

FFX cost 30+ million around the same for kh, FF12 went for 40 million budget

UE3 costs anywhere from $500,000-$1,000,000 to license, so it wouldn't have increased the price that much. You can't include UE3 development costs because UE3 has been licensed out and sold to so many companies, there was no cost associated with making Gears with UE3 that would have inflated the budget.

Red Steel was made with a modified version of UE2.5. The issue with Red Steel was that the developers hadn't worked with UE3 before, and weren't able to get it working easily - regardless if it was a Wii game.

The 3 games you named (as well as the other ones) have their own proprietary, one-off game engine built for one console. That adds a lot of expenses in it, as your having to build all the assets for the said game, and have a very menial starting point. Because of that, you have to dedicate a lot more extra time to build the engine, optimize it, trouble shoot it, and everything else - only to never use it again. It's like building a house, and throwing away the blueprints after you build it...Not always the most cost-effective thing you can do. That's why S/E is moving to Crystal Tools. Thanks to Crystal Tools (I believe), we can attribute the multi-platform nature of XIII - since CT is an engine that can work on the X360 and PS3 without many major issues.

And you can name games farther back than PS2-gen games that cost a lot to make - Heck, Super Mario 64 and Zelda: OoT were well, WELL above "normal" development budgets of the day.

chasmatic12 and mrstickball said it best.

But keep in mind that a game doesn't have to sell 1mil+ be profitable. In reverse, some games can sell 1mil+ and still not be profitable. Depends on how much was spent.