Game Development Cost

These costs are not comparable to movie costs yet (excluding GTA), but profit is.

Killzone 2 is a lot more than 20 mil, they started on it well before 2007..

I think most games blow through way too much money. Do you REALLY need 50 mil to make a game? GOW is a nice example, super succesfull game made with just 10 mil.

IMO studios waste a lot of money on random and unneccy stuff.

Half-Life 2 was about 40 million $ as well - Hourences - GOW did cost 10m$ without UE3 licensing/own engine development. Games like GTA4 which develop a full city and/or a complete new engine as Half-Life 2 with Source won't get cheaper (at least if you want to keep the same quality).

The big problem about comparing Game Development Costs against Movie Costs is that there are a lot more specific technical costs bound to Game Development. No movie team licenses UE3, Source or iD Tech, neither do they have to invent the camera again and again. As buddy pointed out I'd compare the profit/win of games and movies but there's little info about how much profit games make up atm. It'd be nice though to have such stats with details on online distribution and monthly fees etc. and split that down to how much one (individual and company) gains in the process of creating games.

What the hell do they spend so much money on?

Paychecks; Employee's don't come cheap.

Easy calculation:

6 years development

avg 150 devs of all kind with avg income of 2500$ per month

2500 * 150 * 12 * 6 = 27 Million $. Add some freelancing, outsourcing, licensing, hardware, power-costs, water-costs etc. and you are pretty much at 40 Million $

Six years is way more than the average dev cycle takes. Six years also means to me that the studio behind the project had problems developing the product, as for 99 percent of all games there is no need at all to spend 6 years on it.

Try three for a big game.

And we earn more than 2500 on avg.

Six years was Half-Life 2 (which was about 40m$) as an example.

a little off topic but tailing on the income-question:

What do people at the age of 40+ do in the game industry? atm everyone here is 20 to 30 years old (at least most of us) - but how are job perspectives with 40, 50 or even 60 within the industry (or are we all going to be unemployed at that age?) - I can't figure out everyone writing books and become consultants, lobbyists and major-publishers

HL2 is not your standard game. Also was it really neccy for the game to take 6 years? If they would have handled development differently, wouldn't they have been able to make the exact same game in half the time? Hence my whole point, what the heck do they need this much money for?

How do other industries handle 40-50 year olds? I dont think the games industry will handle that all too differently from the other industries.

Most all of the games I play were developed with a considerably smaller budget. I would wager that 75% of all the money they spend on those type of games go to developing bits I really don't care about.

What about the distributioncosts ? And the advertisement. or isnt that included in the develoments costs ?

Well, let me quote something:

Quote from Valve Software

Our beliefs about work environments are pretty simple: give talented and experienced people the tools they need, the colleagues who will stimulate them, and the opportunity to build games they want to play. We are constantly on the lookout for self-motivated, self-directed individuals who are interested in all aspects of building great entertainment experiences.The people who work at Valve are multi-talented, with expertise in one or two particular areas. We don’t have managers or producers of any kind. We tend to hire senior people who have shipped several titles before arriving here. And we have also hired a few people right out of school when we've been impressed by an interesting game, mod, or level that the candidate built.

We are always looking for smart, talented, creative, interesting people who are solving interesting problems—people who will make our products and our company the best in the industry.

And its best thing you can do. In most companies ppl like managers or producers take 5, even 10 times more than the most important staff (in our case artists etc).

it's all about profit, if you can ensure (to a certain extent) that the game will make profit after sales, it's acceptable to spend almost what ever figure of money you can think of. GTA4 is an example of spending crazy money but making that back in a few weeks. Any game that makesa total profit even if £1 has been positive.

As others have said game engine lisences, tools such as Maya, photoshop and crazy console sdk costs all add up. Free food in crunch times, release party ...

yeah I can believe all of those numbers...

Wasn't Kojima (or MGS4's US associate producer) quoted saying the game cost 120 millions total in one of Kotaku's news? Don't know exactly what this figure comprises but if you look at GTAIV's rumoured budget vs a game like MGS4, it could reach that when all is said and done.

And spending 100 millions on GTAIV when it sells 6 million copies on the first DAY, which means it broke even on that first day after its release, that's something I can see tons of developers wanting to put their money on

Quote from Buddy

Well, let me quote something:

And its best thing you can do. In most companies ppl like managers or producers take 5, even 10 times more than the most important staff (in our case artists etc).

I'd agree with this. The first mod team I joined (at 14, for a Deus Ex mod) had four members: Me, as the mapper, one guy (who's now my best friend) as the coder, and two writers, one of which was the "mod leader". Me and the coder got along fine and produced plenty. All the two chaff ever produced was a list of books and quotes that were going to be added to the game as flavor text in datacubes and readable books. It eventually ended unceremoniously when the two writer guys got in an argument and stopped talking to each other, both expecting the coder and I to side with them to create a different mod. We told them to go fuck themselves.