game development costs

[dantoddd]

I have read several articles claiming that developing games for the new gen consoles will multiple times more expensive than developing for the old ones. The main reason given for these costs are apparently the graphical fidelity of these machines and the technical expertise required attain it.

however, i see PC games which have so much more fidelity than the next gen console games, which are seemingly made using budgets that are considerably smaller than major AAA games. What gives? why can games like Rome 2 be built for so much cheaper whilst games like Ryse cost so much more

 

[Savagezion]

My guess is Hollywood marketing. Buying the rights to use an engine like Frostbite could be wiggled into 30 games that use it, inflating their production costs. I have seen insane numbers like CoD MW3 costing $200m yet reusing graphical assets from previous games. Maybe they ordered Pizza for that dev building and called it a business expense. People do shady budgeting in Hollywood and I bet those same tricks are manageable in the game industry. The biggest problem is hidden sales numbers. Steam needs to give those up soon too. I think the industry would benefit from a site like BoxOfficeMojo for games.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

'Developing costs' is the excuse given to try and make people pay more for less. Don't overthink it...it's bullshit to justify decadence. They can't be arsed making their own arguments so they float an idea and let other people debate and argue over it for them...then they use the end result to justify a price hike that they always intended. Cynical i may be but i've lived through enough such things to have spotted the trends.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Ya I'll throw my hat in with Hollywood production syndrome, and CoD is the perfect example because that game looked like ass for 6 years straight but the budgets they put forth were simply off the chain.
Of course if you take into account they had marketing deals absolutely everywhere with everyone, signing on pretty much any B roll "star" they could get their hands on and the entire campaign being 5 hours of non-stop scripted extravaganza... none of that shit comes cheap, especially not when on top of all this you have a massive conglomeration of management all waiting for their 100k+ pay check plus millions in rewards.

If they released the actual development costs I bet half those triple A games didn't even come close to half of what all the people involved burned on odd expenses, at least Heavy Rain devs disclosed that of the 50mil spent on the game only 20 were in development.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I have seen insane numbers like CoD MW3 costing $200m yet reusing graphical assets from previous games.

Well, they had approximately 250+ people working on the game between three different studios (not counting Treyarch's port to the Wii), and each one likely worked 40+ (emphasis on the plus) hours a week on the project over the course of 1-2 years. Once you throw the costs of marketing, voice acting, music (composer, musicians, etc.), writers, and other extra costs not related to the salaries of the studio employees into the mix, it doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine it could cost $200 million, especially after adding DLC costs.

OT: A lot of factors can contribute. As I noted above, you have to consider the growing size of development teams to meet the increasing demand of making games. A lot of AAA studios, along with their massive teams necessary to pump out titles as large and polished as they (generally) do (not that there aren't a few unpolished games here and there), also higher reasonably good voice actors, numerous people to do the music, and a famous screenwriter (sometimes). There's also the increasing technological costs to get the graphics and animations that AAA games get, and you really can't argue that they aren't (normally) the best we'll see during the year. On top of that, you have to add the massive marketing campaigns a lot of these games get. I mean, does it really surprise you that Battlefield 4 had vastly greater costs associated with it than Battlefield 2 did, or that Battlefield 10 (no, that's not a typo) will likely have greater costs associated with it than Battlefield 4?

I do know that you bring up lesser-known titles that can get by with lower costs, but generally they have to cut costs in some way compared to AAA games. What a lot of smaller teams do is they find ways to compensate. They use compelling aesthetics to make up for worse graphics and animations. They use more simple soundtracks and get a lesser-known composer and musicians to work on it. They don't higher a Hollywood screenwriter for the script, and they often have noticeably lower quality voice work than AAA games, provided they even have voice acting at all. They also don't flood us with advertising as much. I'm not saying this makes the games worse, but if you pay attention, you can easily see how they are cutting costs to make a highly compelling game on a lower budget.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I have seen insane numbers like CoD MW3 costing $200m yet reusing graphical assets from previous games.

Well, they had approximately 250+ people working on the game between three different studios (not counting Treyarch's port to the Wii), and each one likely worked 40+ (emphasis on the plus) hours a week on the project over the course of 1-2 years. Once you throw the costs of marketing, voice acting, music (composer, musicians, etc.), writers, and other extra costs not related to the salaries of the studio employees into the mix, it doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine it could cost $200 million, especially after adding DLC costs.

NOPE, The game itself must have costed like 30 million dollars, and the rest was all marketing, thats how it works.
You know, the most expensive game evermade is GTA V, it costed 115 million USD to develop (and most of it was spend licensing songs), in contrast the second most expensive game is Halo 4 and it costed 30-40 million dollars to develop.... ALL THE REST GOES TO MARKETING...
You see marketing is the true vampire in the industry, because in modern capitalism what really matters is to make your client believe your product is good, the actual quality of the product comes in second place.

I was mostly making a point about all the things you have to consider when factoring in costs. Just assuming 2 years development time with 100 employees making industry averages of about $81,000 a year [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167355/] already leads to $16.2 million in costs, and with the approximately 250+ that MW3 had working on it, you've brought up the cost to about $40.5+ million (which is already more than a vast majority of the smaller projects the OP referenced), and that's before you consider music and voice work. Sure, marketing plays a huge role, and I wasn't trying to discount that in my comment. I even brought it up in my comment:

Once you throw the costs of marketing...

However, we do have to realize that costs are rather large even without factoring in incredibly high marketing costs, much higher than what a lot of non-AAA titles are capable of. Marketing only makes the problem worse, but can you really blame a company that invested $30+ million in a project to not do everything they can to make sure people know about it? Yes, the added costs of marketing are a risk, but it's also a relatively smart risk to take provided you know what you are doing.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Well, its just that COD is the worst example of how games are developed, it requires an insane amount of persons and just produces a lot of redundant or plain copy-pasted content, not to mention that it isnt worth the two years development time. It remains in its place because it feeds itself with money from brainless human beings, and those are quite common.
You should cite other examples like Bungie making two games (ODST and Reach) in 3 years with only 60 persons and a smaller budget (60 million for Reach including marketing, but not including the live-action shorts).

The conversation started because of a conversation about Call of Duty, and my response to you was due to you criticizing what I said about Call of Duty. How was I supposed to know that the conversation wasn't about Call of Duty? And yes, I understand that Call of Duty seems to have more than a few problems in terms of its resource management. I have ideas of where it may all be going, but again, information on how money is spent on the franchise is hard to come by, and the most we have is guesswork. The only solid one is MW2, which was hardly a copy/paste game, that cost about $50+ million to develop [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2009/11/-video-game-call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-gets-hollywoodscale-launch.html] after inflation is taken into consideration. But anyways, I'm getting off on a tangent.

In any case, back in 2010, they found average development costs for a single platform are about $10 million [http://www.develop-online.net/news/study-average-dev-costs-as-high-as-28m/0106030], and it reaches anywhere from about $20 million to $30 million for multiplatform. Larger games unsurprisingly will cost a lot more than even the $30 million. This isn't just Call of Duty. This is industry-wide, and again, marketing costs are driving things up, but they are hardly where the high expenses start (though they do make it more mind blowing). I'm sorry, but unless you can somehow explain that $10 million for a single platform and upwards of $30 million average for multiplatform (keeping in mind that "average" means there's plenty above it) isn't expensive, I think it stands that expensiveness starts at development costs.

And all this nonsense about "ITLL COST 10 TIMES MORE AND IT WILL BE 10 TIMES HARDER TO PROGRAM BECAUSE BOLLOCKS!!!" is just that; NONSENSE.

Eh, we'll see. As this graph shows [http://static1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080705213348/vgsales/images/c/c6/Factor_5_dev_costs.jpg], the lower end of game development costs at the end of the 6th generation were about 1/10 of what the upper end average was at the end of the 7th generation (based on the article I cited above). Consequently, it doesn't seem too far-fetched at the moment to believe they will go up ten times over the course of this next generation. Personally, I'd imagine development cost growth will slow down over the course of the 8th generation compared to the 7th generation, but we'll have to wait to see where we are in seven years when we're ready for the next consoles.

 

[kilenem]

I know COD is a mediocre game but could people stop pretending like its the worst FPS ever made. They don't show trailers with things that aren't in the game, it looks like the DLC isn't on the Disc and the servers work.

I think some people don't know how to manga money. When Tim schaffer went over budget on his kickstarter game I stopped feeling bad for him. There is a reason why the thing with Activsion happened.

 

[Tomeran]

I know COD is a mediocre game but could people stop pretending like its the worst FPS ever made. They don't show trailers with things that aren't in the game, it looks like the DLC isn't on the Disc and the servers work.

I think some people don't know how to manga money. When Tim schaffer went over budget on his kickstarter game I stopped feeling bad for him. There is a reason why the thing with Activsion happened.

I dont think people think CoD is the worst shooter ever made. There's just a lot of frustration because the games see extremly limited development between each CoD game there is, and they still sell like butter. That sends a negative image to the rest of game development that "If we market the product well enough it doesnt really matter what kind of quality the product itself has." CoD's put itself into the position where the product is so mainstream that even if it WAS truly junk, rather then the mediocre-at-best shooter it is, it would still sell like butter.

This example alone has helped influence gamemaking on a fairly large scale. While CoD certainly isnt a solitary villain in this scheme, its certainly a very good example, because its certainly played a very big role. WoW for example has been in a similar situation in terms of mmorpgs, although that has certainly started to decline by now.

Game franchises that can survive on their name alone rather then their actual content is a publisher's wet dream, and for all the wrong reasons.

 

[kilenem]

I know COD is a mediocre game but could people stop pretending like its the worst FPS ever made. They don't show trailers with things that aren't in the game, it looks like the DLC isn't on the Disc and the servers work.

I think some people don't know how to manga money. When Tim schaffer went over budget on his kickstarter game I stopped feeling bad for him. There is a reason why the thing with Activsion happened.

I dont think people think CoD is the worst shooter ever made. There's just a lot of frustration because the games see extremly limited development between each CoD game there is, and they still sell like butter. That sends a negative image to the rest of game development that "If we market the product well enough it doesnt really matter what kind of quality the product itself has." CoD's put itself into the position where the product is so mainstream that even if it WAS truly junk, rather then the mediocre-at-best shooter it is, it would still sell like butter.

This example alone has helped influence gamemaking on a fairly large scale. While CoD certainly isnt a solitary villain in this scheme, its certainly a very good example, because its certainly played a very big role. WoW for example has been in a similar situation in terms of mmorpgs, although that has certainly started to decline by now.

Game franchises that can survive on their name alone rather then their actual content is a publisher's wet dream, and for all the wrong reasons.

I don't think COD duty could get away with actually making horrible games. COD black ops DS was actually reviewed pretty well and sold well. COD Black Ops on VITA reviewed badly and sold badly

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

however, i see PC games which have so much more fidelity than the next gen console games, which are seemingly made using budgets that are considerably smaller than major AAA games. What gives? why can games like Rome 2 be built for so much cheaper whilst games like Ryse cost so much more

It's all a matter of what you mean by "graphics" and "fidelity". Better hardware primarily gives you access to two different resources of consequence: processing power and memory. That power can be used in various ways. In general, the PC version of a game doesn't look better for any reason other than the simple fact that it can use more computational expensive algorithms to process lighting and deliver a higher resolution (among other things). Take, for example, Skyrim. The basic version of the game you get on PC is more or less identical to the one on the 360 right down to the textures that are chock full of artifacts. That blocky face thing you noticed on consoles happens on the PC version too. The difference is that the PC version can display things at further distances without losing framerate, can use a better form of AA, can use full reflections on the water and so forth. All of these are features inherent to the engine and are created by a relatively small handful of people even for the largest and most complex games.

The other thing you can do is create actual assets for the game - everything from models of people, dogs, cars, books, buildings to the textures that gives them color and the various additional layers that offer texture and proper response to lighting. As you have more power, you can also add more detail to each individual object. More polygons need to be used for each model, more frames of animation can be created, more pixels can be found in each texture. This means creating any particular thing takes more work (measured in hours) if you want it to look as good as it can on fancy new hardware than it would on hardware made a decade ago. This goes for each and every object. To put it simply, were you to simply remake Morrowind using the the graphical standards of Battlefield 4, a great many more development hours would be necessary which directly results in higher costs (those people working those hours don't work for free after all).

As far as why there is such variation comes down to just how much actual work is being done and how much is being cheated or automated. A game like Rome has relatively little in the way of unique assets. There are several dozen unique character models but they simply swap out parts as necessary to create the illusion that more work was done than was done in reality. Lots of things are procedurally generated (that is, created by a computer program).

The problem with outsourcing lots of stuff to a program is that you leave a great deal to chance leading to problems of pacing, terrifying and hard to solve bugs, and a general lack of predictability. This is a problem if you want to produce the game equivalent of a Blockbuster movie - games like Ryse and Call of Duty. In these games, very little can be left to chance and thus much of the work simply has to be done by hand as it ensures predictability in all measures.

Or, to put it very simply, games cost more as hardware improves because the consumer expectation of the product demands the effort be put in place.

 

[Savagezion]

I have seen insane numbers like CoD MW3 costing $200m yet reusing graphical assets from previous games.

Well, they had approximately 250+ people working on the game between three different studios (not counting Treyarch's port to the Wii), and each one likely worked 40+ (emphasis on the plus) hours a week on the project over the course of 1-2 years. Once you throw the costs of marketing, voice acting, music (composer, musicians, etc.), writers, and other extra costs not related to the salaries of the studio employees into the mix, it doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine it could cost $200 million, especially after adding DLC costs.

OT: A lot of factors can contribute. As I noted above, you have to consider the growing size of development teams to meet the increasing demand of making games. A lot of AAA studios, along with their massive teams necessary to pump out titles as large and polished as they (generally) do (not that there aren't a few unpolished games here and there), also higher reasonably good voice actors, numerous people to do the music, and a famous screenwriter (sometimes). There's also the increasing technological costs to get the graphics and animations that AAA games get, and you really can't argue that they aren't (normally) the best we'll see during the year. On top of that, you have to add the massive marketing campaigns a lot of these games get. I mean, does it really surprise you that Battlefield 4 had vastly greater costs associated with it than Battlefield 2 did, or that Battlefield 10 (no, that's not a typo) will likely have greater costs associated with it than Battlefield 4?

I do know that you bring up lesser-known titles that can get by with lower costs, but generally they have to cut costs in some way compared to AAA games. What a lot of smaller teams do is they find ways to compensate. They use compelling aesthetics to make up for worse graphics and animations. They use more simple soundtracks and get a lesser-known composer and musicians to work on it. They don't higher a Hollywood screenwriter for the script, and they often have noticeably lower quality voice work than AAA games, provided they even have voice acting at all. They also don't flood us with advertising as much. I'm not saying this makes the games worse, but if you pay attention, you can easily see how they are cutting costs to make a highly compelling game on a lower budget.

There is no way to convince me that 200m dollar budget for MW3 is true. Especially, reusing the same engine and even some of the same models and textures from MW1&2. They can claim marketing all they want, but their marketing campaign for MW3 wasn't THAT big for starters - and marketing is not a part of the development and is expendable. (Did you just hear all the publishers gasp?) 200 Million dollars is a lot of money. A lot. 200 million dollars is enough to create the entire world in Avatar and cast big name stars not only for the camera but behind the camera. That is individual people sucking up 5-10m a pop. God help you if you want Johnny Depp or someone really expensive. Those are powerful special effects too. Compare the technology used to create and market Avatar all while also hiring middle class workers and then tell me honestly that modern warfare 3 cost that same amount of money. Absolutely no budget infaltion to see here, folks. It didn't really cost them that, it just looks like it on the books. But honest wholesome people of Activision wouldn't ever do anything like that would they?

Surely not.

 

[MysticSlayer]

There is no way to convince me that 200m dollar budget for MW3 is true. Especially, reusing the same engine and even some of the same models and textures from MW1&2. They can claim marketing all they want, but their marketing campaign for MW3 wasn't THAT big for starters - and marketing is not a part of the development and is expendable. (Did you just hear all the publishers gasp?)

I think I pointed out in another post that the $200 million is an estimate some gamers and analysts have given to the game after marketing costs are considered. This is based around the better-known budget of MW2, which did come to around $200 million after everything, including marketing and manufacturing costs (which together took about $150 million of that!), were taken into consideration (the actual development took about $40-50 million). As far as I know, the actual development costs of MW3 haven't been released to the public, but guesses from (totally unqualified) people seem to put it anywhere from $30 million, which seems unreasonably low once you consider the salaries alone, to $90 million, which seems unreasonably high. We also have no clue what the actual marketing budget is, but a lot of people guess it was even higher than development costs. As for whether or not Activision inflated the costs through questionable recording is, likewise, mere speculation, as we don't have access to how much it actually cost, much less how things were recorded. It wouldn't surprise me if the marketing and manufacturing costs are well overstated, though.

 

[gargantual]

Ya I'll throw my hat in with Hollywood production syndrome, and CoD is the perfect example because that game looked like ass for 6 years straight but the budgets they put forth were simply off the chain.
Of course if you take into account they had marketing deals absolutely everywhere with everyone, signing on pretty much any B roll "star" they could get their hands on and the entire campaign being 5 hours of non-stop scripted extravaganza... none of that shit comes cheap, especially not when on top of all this you have a massive conglomeration of management all waiting for their 100k+ pay check plus millions in rewards.

If they released the actual development costs I bet half those triple A games didn't even come close to half of what all the people involved burned on odd expenses, at least Heavy Rain devs disclosed that of the 50mil spent on the game only 20 were in development.

Probably no bigger than the estimated 5 million taken to develop Half-life 2, and even for Half-life, that was a transitional period for Valve. (the moving into their 1st apartment phase) We gotta factor in, they were upping the source engine for the first time, the dude that hacked their game while still in development. There was the court case and they had to re-hash and exclude concept characters. Female combine assassin, a special combine enemy for Nova Prospekt, etc, and then putting it on Steam.

If everything wasn't so rocky, how much money might they have saved for just the game' itself.

 

[Savagezion]

There is no way to convince me that 200m dollar budget for MW3 is true. Especially, reusing the same engine and even some of the same models and textures from MW1&2. They can claim marketing all they want, but their marketing campaign for MW3 wasn't THAT big for starters - and marketing is not a part of the development and is expendable. (Did you just hear all the publishers gasp?)

I think I pointed out in another post that the $200 million is an estimate some gamers and analysts have given to the game after marketing costs are considered. This is based around the better-known budget of MW2, which did come to around $200 million after everything, including marketing and manufacturing costs (which together took about $150 million of that!), were taken into consideration (the actual development took about $40-50 million). As far as I know, the actual development costs of MW3 haven't been released to the public, but guesses from (totally unqualified) people seem to put it anywhere from $30 million, which seems unreasonably low once you consider the salaries alone, to $90 million, which seems unreasonably high. We also have no clue what the actual marketing budget is, but a lot of people guess it was even higher than development costs. As for whether or not Activision inflated the costs through questionable recording is, likewise, mere speculation, as we don't have access to how much it actually cost, much less how things were recorded. It wouldn't surprise me if the marketing and manufacturing costs are well overstated, though.

I do think the marketing cost being thrown in at such a large amount, is straight overkill though. Even on MW2. (which seemed bigger) I too would put it in the ballpark of 60 million. (30-40 million seems right on MW3) I read (unqualified sources) that the marketing alone was around 200 million on one of em. Probably both if MW2 did. I would only put the marketing at about 100 million. It used merchandising as a part of its marketing and I don't count a modern warfare T-shirt or controller as marketing; but merchandising. I didn't see no 200 million dollars worth of commercials or campaigns. I saw maybe 100 million if I am generous.

My problem is I just don't trust the industry. Shall I trust the CEOs or the gaming media which have been legitimately scrutinized over the past decade. I know that Hollywood pulls crap like that all the time.

 

[Evonisia]

I know COD is a mediocre game but could people stop pretending like its the worst FPS ever made. They don't show trailers with things that aren't in the game, it looks like the DLC isn't on the Disc and the servers work.

I think some people don't know how to manga money. When Tim schaffer went over budget on his kickstarter game I stopped feeling bad for him. There is a reason why the thing with Activsion happened.

I dont think people think CoD is the worst shooter ever made. There's just a lot of frustration because the games see extremly limited development between each CoD game there is, and they still sell like butter. That sends a negative image to the rest of game development that "If we market the product well enough it doesnt really matter what kind of quality the product itself has." CoD's put itself into the position where the product is so mainstream that even if it WAS truly junk, rather then the mediocre-at-best shooter it is, it would still sell like butter.

This example alone has helped influence gamemaking on a fairly large scale. While CoD certainly isnt a solitary villain in this scheme, its certainly a very good example, because its certainly played a very big role. WoW for example has been in a similar situation in terms of mmorpgs, although that has certainly started to decline by now.

Game franchises that can survive on their name alone rather then their actual content is a publisher's wet dream, and for all the wrong reasons.

I don't think COD duty could get away with actually making horrible games. COD black ops DS was actually reviewed pretty well and sold well. COD Black Ops on VITA reviewed badly and sold badly

Well they can get away with making awful games so long as they make money. Modern Warfare 3 was absolutely terrible and cheaply made in almost all of the fractions of it's existence but still managed to pull in millions of dollars from sales.