Think Movies are Expensive to Make? Games Are!

It's amazing the the price to make a game has gone up so much, yet the overall quality and complexity of game play has gone down. I think there is too much money sunk into marketing these days.

Duke Nukem Forever? infinite million

That guy had better give us a shenmue III. The ending of II was almost as bad as "I'm here to finish the fight"

11 ?

Hahahahah, what!? I'm sorry, but that's seriously the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

Go back and play the run-of-the-mill SNES game in the 90s, and then play a run-of-the-mill PC game released today. Our standards are a lot higher than they used to be.

+1 machboxmatt

All the more reason, I feel, for companies to give us incentives to buy games and not torrent them instead. Note i said 'incentives', not DRM.

Grand Theft Auto IV had over $500 million in revenue after just one week of being on sale. Halo 3 had $174 million in revenue 24 hours after hitting the streets. Am I supposed to be sympathetic because of high development costs when these companies are making triple their investment in the first 24 hours of release? I understand that not all of the revenue goes to the developers but even if just 20% of it goes back to the developers GTA4 was raking in pure profit after week 1.

Interesting that modern warfair 2 isn't up there, yet it grossed so much. They could have easily added more content to it.

Money in no way equals quality. If the gaming industry continues down this path, we're going to see an inordinate amount of high-budget stinkers come out on a regular basis for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Oh wait, we're already at that point. GTA IV, anyone?

I thought Half-Life 2 cost about $90M, and that Mass Effect was around $60M too.

WOW! I didn't know just how much money was involved. Tjose are some very large numbers.

"Most games today have Hollywood movie budgets."

No real surprise with all the money they waste on trying to make cinematic cut scenes. If game play lacks adding more cut scenes is the trend developers have been using for the last 10+ years.

Yeah some of these games make several times their budget but they have to makeup for all the stinkers like Too Human.

One thing I want to know, are these just the production budgets or do they also include the marketing/promotional budgets?

GTA 4's pricetag may have had something to do with the giant posters that were all over LA before the release

I bet league of legends didn't cost anywhere close to those games and yet has game play better than pretty much all of the above.

It's amazing how you can throw that kind on money around & not come out with a good game. Now they should also give you the break down on advertising & marketing from those figures...

None of my top 10 games even made the list, showing that $ spent does not = quality! (tho a few of my top 10 are more then 15 years old now!)

define "quality" Are you talking about graphics? Game play?,etc?

Imo, most of the PC games now are cr@ppy console ports and just re-makes. There haven't been any "revolutionary" games in a while for PC (ie for example Crysis was to graphics whereas Doom was to FPS)

doesn't reflect inflation and doesn't even include marketing budget.

I don't get how a game can cost as much as a Hollywood summer movie. (you know the "blockbuster" kind woth all the big stars and the big explosions?) How can GTA cost $100 mil if you don't have to pay for sets, explosives and all that? If a large chunk of that goes to the actual people who program the game then damn! i'm in the wrong job!

When I saw Too Human at number 4, I cringed, poor Silicon Knights. That game wasn't bad, but when it couldn't deliver the goods against the hype it got a pretty bad rep. with reviewers and the media.

Let's see a list of top 10 movies side by side with the games. Just curious.

Sadly I think this list is almost a guesswork.

A lot of the companies in this list do not actually reveal any of their expenses in regards to game development. Especially a lot of Japanese companies. I remember an interview saying that the MGS4 "budget" in this list is false and saying if this budget is true than MGS4 would be a multiplatform game right now.

First he said run of the mill. That does not mean compare super mario world to anything in general today. It means compare something that might end up ridiculed by the angry videogame nerd on SNES to something like clive barker's Jericho. I'd say Jericho wins that one.

Second there is no longer any such thing as "revolutionary" like that. That's like saying you're bored of electricity because there's nothing "revolutionary" anymore. It had to start with something, and that's all there is to it. (unless you wanna count the wii and project natal. Even then you could say those aren't new the power glove did it first)

woot StarCraft FTW!!!!!!!

Simple, every cost while developing this cost would be in here....so the taxes, utilities, wages (programmers wage is roughly $100,000/year i think), machines (computers/consols/etc), software (think about this, 1 piece of software like maya can cost over 3 grand and that is only for 1 computer....now all the artists (maybe 10-20 people) would have this so that kind of stuff is a huge cost), next can be food (alot of game companies have a fully stocked kitchen for the employees), etc. While movies have big name actors that gets tons of money, not many other people make much. While game companies have alot of people that all make a decent amount.

Oh how I love capitalism. This list made my day: the crappy games cost more to make. That is wonderful news! That means that the big companies sink huge sums of money into games that, with a few exceptions, did not sell well, or soon died down. Seems to me that the companies that waste so much capital on crap will die, making room for developers who actually know what they're doing (Valve anyone?)

The fact of the matter is that we live in the society of the common man, which means that for the most part our culture will be decidedly mediocre as far as quality goes. The beautiful part is that we are all free to express ourselves, so the gems will eventually rise to the top, even if you have to do a little digging--Mount and Blade comes to my mind immediately. Equality of condition truly is a wondrous, if far from perfect, thing.

mgs4 didn't cost $60 mil bro apparently the producer said if it cost even $55 mil it would have had to be multiplatform source: http://thesnakesoup.org/?section=a [...] dex&t=3877

mgs4 didn't cost $60 mil bro apparently the producer said if it cost even $55 mil it would have had to be multiplatform source: http://thesnakesoup.org/?section=a [...] dex&t=3877

I agree with guy about Shenmue, best DC game to me, and one of the major reasons I became interested in learning about japanese culture, in hopes to move there some day VERY soon. On that note, the reason is everyone wants triple A titles, usually of the FPS variety, just because they are bankable. This mostly applies to consoles, thanks to devs taking advantage of those who mistakenly think they are getting a better experience from one. With games like Pain Killer, Serious sam, and other budget titles that hit the spot at the right time, there was tons of options for developers, some of which actually we may simply not see because they cant afford to shell out advertising dollars. Gaming grew out of garage 1-4 man operations, and with the quality of games these days, im thinking it should go back. KNow what im still playing today? Counter-Strike, Baldur's Gate 2, Fire pro Wrestling, hell, even Rogue Spear if I can get it to work on my Vista machine. Developers made games unique back then because it was for the love, not because of the hype surrounding the industry doing better than movies.