On the contrary , I think very few games if any take that long to develop from begining to end and the pre-production stages don't require too much resources it's only when the game goes into full scale production that resources are really poured into the development of the game.

Not only development costs matter, also media advertasing games like GTA IV not only had high Development costs but also great media campaing behind them which costs a lot of money.

BengaBenga's estimates seem pretty much spot on. I can't remember who mentioned the 20million average dev cost I think maybe it was capcom. Forbes mentioned that they spent 20million advertising Lost planet and how it was equal to the cost of developing the game. So that is 40million for a good quality highly advertised game. (you can find the article on kotaku, gamingpr etc)

Midway stated stranglehold cost 30million to make. I suppose they had slightly higher costs due to licensing the film, getting chow yun fat etc. However at the same time it wasn't in development that long or advertised that much etc.

There were rumours KZ2 was costing $60million in development costs even when it was expected to have released fall 2008. So yea 70mill estimate is probably about right, maybe even higher if those estimates didn't include advertising budget. If you consider Stranglehold cost $30mill and LP $40mill then KZ2 is clearly going to be above those as it's been in development much longer by a bigger team.

SO I guess GT5 : P has covered ALL GT5 expenses?

 Sounds about right. Scary how much this stuff can run you isn't it?

Let's say that a game like Killzone 2 or FFXIII takes 3 years to develop with a full team. Let's say that the team is about 250 persons. You have 40 persons working on CGI, 40 programmers, 145 artists (3D models, textures, animation), about 10 management guys, 5 audio/sound effect composer and 10 QA leads. Now, let's say those people are paid about 55k per year (it isn't that much for a big studio). It costs then 41 250 000 for the production team.

Now, add testers (that aren't paid well but there are a lot of them), voice actors (if you take John DiMaggio like Gears of War, it's pricey), legal fees, marketing, etc. Then, I suppose you are closer to 70 M$.

There you have it. High budget games cost a lot because making beautiful 3D models is an extremely long process. I read somewhere that in GTA, each artist was making like 1 or 2 streets.

@Godot: I would add that the cost of an employee is usually around twice his/her salary, due to taxes, office space, equipment etc. A cost of $100,000 per employee per year is not unreasonable.

Gears of War cost $10 million. Source

Its safe to assume that high quality HD games cost $10-15 (as Epic would've have been able to cut a few corners, they had a game engine off the bat for example) million to make, not counting marketing. Now I would imagine titles like Lost Planet may be slightly cheaper and titles like KZ2, GT5 etc a bit more ($20+ million?). Wii games are probaly alot cheaper. I would guess around 3 million (on average) copies need to be sold for a good profit to be made whereas with Wii I would suspect anywhere between 300k - 1 million copies would do.

Incidetally, does anyone know why GTA IV cost $100 million? Seems abnormally high to me.

They probably get like $15-$20 per copy due to the lower retail price.

At 2.33m copies, that's $35-$45 million, which I'd guess is lower than all GT5 expenses. It's a big game and I suppose they have to pay the car manufacturers for the rights to use them in the game.

In the end they're sure to get a profit out of that one though.

If 3.5 million is the norm for a game to break even, looks like there will definitely be Gran Turismo 6. :D

I am sure that the prologue has paid at least 20% of the costs off which is also good. What is crazy is the amount of profit which Dragon Quest 9 will make. The game is on DS so must not have cost as much as a HD console to make and it will easily sell 6M so damn. O_O