Table of Contents 64q43
It's no secret to anyone: making games takes time, effort and, of course, money. The greater the scope and desired reach of the product, the greater the investments in the scope of development, marketing and distribution. But what are the most expensive games ever made and around how much did they cost? The answer is not simple and you will understand why. 43p1o
After all, how much does it cost to make a game? 6q204w
When we talk about the estimated investment for the production of a digital game, there is a huge range of costs that must be considered. First, you need to understand what the project will require in of infrastructure, playable experience, and skilled workforce.
Games from major production companies, such as PlayStation or Ubisoft, like to focus their efforts on scenes with photorealistic animations — often produced under a cinematic direction that requires high-quality motion capture, facial mapping and modeling. Therefore, a considerable part of the budget ends up being used to hire these professionals.
What a lot of people don't know, however, is that the biggest costs are associated with marketing and outreach campaigns in general. for the called AAA (budgets of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars), these costs can represent up to 70% of the total cost by the time the game is in the hands of the public.
The Last Of Us Part II 4m456n
The Last Of Us Part II raises the bar of quality previously established by the critical and public success of Uncharted 4, becoming one of the most praised and controversial prestige games of recent years. In addition to having the difficult mission of living up to the excellent first entry in the franchise, originally released in 2013, the sequel also took aim at the stars with an even longer and more realistic playable experience and narrative in audiovisual .
According to one article written for the ScreenRant website, the budget to produce The Last of Us Part II is estimated at $100 million — if not more. With so many accessibility features and years of work going into implementing and polishing the mechanics, this cost is understandable for just one game.
Cyberpunk 2077 4343
The commercial and artistic success of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt it was such that it ended up changing the history of CD Projekt Red forever. With a Game of the Year award in hand and over 30 million copies of its latest game sold, the Polish developer and publisher didn't have to think twice about how much it would need to spend on its next project: Cyberpunk 2077. However, little did they know that, in a few years, one of the biggest vexations in of launching story games.
You may already know the story: the open world game, released in December 2020, came out with an absurd amount of bugs and issues that hampered the experience. As a result, the game received very low ratings on aggregators such as Metacritic and OpenCritic — in addition to being removed from the PlayStation Store for a few months.
The shame had figures in the order of 300 million dollars for more than ten years between its start of production and its continuous routine of updates to correct so many mistakes. Cyberpunk 2077 is still considered, however, a commercial success: the game is already close to 20 million copies sold between digital and physical formats.
Grand Theft Auto V 2v4x2j
GTA V was released in 2013 and remains, even in 2022, one of the best-selling games year after year. This is due to many reasons, but mainly because of the recurring investment that Rockstar Games makes in its ongoing service, Grand Theft Auto Online. At the end of the PS3/Xbox 360 generation, when the game was originally released, it is estimated that the cost to produce the second best-selling game of all time would have been approximately 140 million dollars - and could reach the house of 300. millions of dollars in costs associated with DLC, updates and maintenance.
That said, it's easy to understand how so much money was invested in a single product: GTA V has already made more than 6 billion dollars in almost 9 years of existence, reaching the mark of almost 150 million copies sold on three generations of different consoles. Its immediate success even allowed the developer to put all the efforts and investments of the years following the launch in Red Dead Redemption 2, another electronic entertainment giant that appears on lists of the most expensive games ever produced.
Star Citizen 3h6f55
What if I told you that one of the games selected for our list hasn't been released yet? Well, dear readers: Star Citizen it is still under development and has already accumulated 400 million dollars in investments adjusted for current inflation. In fact, all that money came from a crowdfunding campaign nearly ten years ago — when the company Cloud Imperium Games announced the space MMORPG project.
Although we still don't know many details about all the resources that are still being used for the production of the game, one thing is for sure: the scope seems to be immense, one of the most ambitious in any game ever released. The release date, in turn, has not yet been announced, but the expectation is that the game will hit shelves and digital stores there for 2027, totaling fifteen years since its announcement. How much waiting and how much money for a single game!
Among Us: Subverting Logic 1f2x1u
In many cases, independent game-focused artists and studios don't have the chance to align their interests with major publishers. Therefore, smaller games end up being developed and distributed by the same team, increasing the workload and responsibilities on a small group of professionals. This is the case of Innesloth, a team made up of three developers that timidly launched the social game Among Us in 2018 for iOS and Android.
The game, whose artistic style is quite simplistic, uses the Unity graphics engine and was developed in just over 7 months, focusing on mechanics that require communication between players. Therefore, the investment is estimated to have been in the tens of thousands of dollars and no more.
In July 2020, however, the imminent failure of Among Us would turn into a phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic: the game started to become popular in a frightening way. Innersloth, which was already preparing to launch a “bigger” sequel in the future, went back and started working on continuous content to not let the shuttlecock of the hyping around the first title to fall, taking the initial cost to another level.
And you, have you ever thought about making your own game or being a game design artist? Tell us in the comments!
