List of most expensive video games to develop | Hacker News Reader

List of most expensive video games to develop

en.wikipedia.org

75 pointsluu82 comments

I'm surprised Duke Nukem Forever [1] didn't make the list.

Background for younger readers whose gaming years didn't include the mid-1990's: The first two Duke Nukem games were fairly nondescript 2D platformers, but the third entry in the series, Duke Nukem 3D, was a first-person shooter, quite technically impressive and enormously popular. Duke Nukem 3D was one of the three most influential early first-person shooters that defined a genre that's still quite popular today. (The other two major pioneering games, of course, were Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom.)

Duke Nukem Forever, the fourth entry in the series, is a legendary tale of development hell. Development started in 1996, the same year as Duke Nukem 3D was released, and the game was announced in 1997. The game was finally released in 2011, after numerous staffing changes, reboots, and engine changes (3D graphics technology changed enormously in that time frame; Duke Nukem 3D ran with software renderering in MS-DOS on 486's and Pentiums in the tens to low hundreds of megahertz, while the PC's of 2011 were basically quite similar to modern machines with multicore, multi-GHz CPU's, gigabytes of memory, and GPU's with programmable shaders).

Duke Nukem Forever can't have been cheap to develop, just due to the sheer length of time involved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever

Just yesterday someone on IRC brought up the decades old joke "Which will release first? Duke Nukem Forever or GNU/Hurd?" and yeah, DNF did actually ship.

The "100+" number is too low for Genshin Impact - $100mn was the initial development cost for 1.0, but since then the game map has grown ~3x in size, the story ~3x longer, many live events etc.

See https://www.pcgamesn.com/genshin-impact/cost-most-expensive and https://www.thegamer.com/genshin-impact-most-expensive-game-... which puts the current number at $500 million.

Terrifyingly, I worked on a game (and I worked with the PnL for that game); which would be third on this list.

Given that game development costs are largely unknown to the general public, I seriously doubt that it would have sustained the "3rd place" ranking: I can't help but feel this document isn't really worth very much with that in mind.

I agree - this information is only a sampling and a lot of it is guesses.

Ongoing related thread:

Star Citizen has passed half a billion in funding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32916496 - Sept 2022 (17 comments)

I feel like this whole thing is mischaracterizing funding for cost.

They are not the same and Star Citizen's cost, I think, is mostly unknown.

Saying that they've raised 500 million (funding) isn't the same as saying 500 million has been spent on development (cost).

Serious Question:

Does CoD:MW2 (2009) make more money by spending half as much on marketing?

This is the most lopsided example near the top of the list by far. Is it accurate? 80% of budget to marketing? This is one of the biggest problems with the global economy today as I perceive it (I don't claim any expertise). Companies spending more money telling me how good their product is, instead of spending it on making a good product.

I understand why, to some extent, but 80% is a whole lotta nothing!

In a way you can think of it like this: Do I spend money to make the thing marginally better for people who would probably already buy it?

Or would I spend more money so more people hear about it and buy it?

Once a product I have works to some reasonable standard, I would love to have a bigger audience that knows about it.

Of course you would, as a producer/seller. But for consumers it's terrible. My perception is that "some reasonable standard" has just gotten lower and lower. Corners are cut on quality of personnel, including training, as well as component materials. And the consumers lose. Partly because for many consumers price is the most important factor in purchase decisions, and partly because there is so much marketing (including misinformation and disinformation) from every direction that consumers can't have much of a hope of making informed decisions anyway.

Games seem consistently far far better than what we had before. Not only from tech improvements, but budget allocated for building the product is higher than ever before.

I guess that's your opinion. I'm not seeing the same thing though. And how must it feel as a dev on a game when marketing gets 4x your budget?

MW2 was an absolute phenomenon. It is what made Call of Duty what it is today. I was in college when both MW 1 and 2 came out. I knew no one else that had the first MW, but literally every single friend of mine had MW2. Was this inevitable or was it the marketing?

I think they knew they had a hit on their hands and spent the money to make it a phenomenon. It paid off.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the best selling game of 2007 and sold over 16M copies.

All the future games were just derivatives of what was a fairly genre-defining game.

The game’s campaign is generally regarded as the best the series ever had. It moved away from the very popular world war or sci-fi games that dominated while striking close to home for the post-9/11 generations of gamers who were impacted by the ramped-up wars going on in the Middle East.

The multiplayer for the rest of the series was especially derivative of cod4 as it has basically been a few extra weapons and exorbitant “win more” kill streaks.

And MW2 and the next few iterations sold nearly double that amount selling close to 30m each. It is fair to say MW2 is when it reached the height of relevance.

And while MW was a revelation the multiplayer was perfected in MW2(MW1 had map balance issues). MW2 also introduced the underrated Spec Ops co-op mode.

Statistica puts CoD 4 at 20M units, MW2 at 25M units, and MW3 at 31M units [0].

You must also consider the environment. 2009 was a FPS deadzone. There was MW2, World at War, Resident Evil 5, Left 4 Dead 2, and Borderlands.

2007 had a TON of superb titles including CoD 4, Halo 3, Crysis, Bioshock, Half Life 2/TF2/Portal (Orange Box), S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Quake Wars, and probably a couple I'm forgetting.

Given that difference, MW2 sales being just 20% higher is not that great.

The worst aspect of console CoD 4 and MW2 was grenade spam and the second worst issue was win more killstreaks. Both of these vastly outran any map issues. The only bad map I can recall was the one with all the shipping containers, but that was because it was miniscule.

I used to play a LOT of hardcore search and destroy (with perk, grenade launcher, and killstreak limits -- yay custom PC servers). I don't remember any situation where having fast reflexes wasn't by far the most important thing along with hitting the max FPS (140 FPS?) so you could jump farther (I can't remember if this was fixed in MW2). Maybe it was different for other people though.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/321374/global-all-time-u...

Super Mario for the NES is listed as 0.8 mill for dev and 25 mill for marketing.

Saved you a click, the top 5 are:

- Star Citizen = 419M

- Cyberpunk 2077 = 331M

- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 = 316M

- Final Fantasy VII = 135-245M

- Halo 2 = 230M

Star Citizen is gonna be so good if it ever comes out

Seems like a great game from the gameplay I've watched but for 500M and no end in sight? Seems more like an absurd waste imo.

It has an insane scope - part of what makes it so polarizing - in the end it will end up as an absurd waste or the Star Wars of gaming.

> in the end it will end up as an absurd waste or the Star Wars of gaming.

Why not something like because the funding dries off, they will put together the parts that are somewhat complete into a game that will turn out to be a quite average game with great graphics.

Fans will at the end still stand by their position that Star Citizen could have been so much more. Non-fans will say point out the averageness (beside the graphics) that was not the slightest worth the absurd amount of money.

The problem with Star Citizen is that its development is optimized for attracting new funding, which means after half a billion dollars and more than a decade of development, they still have a game in alpha stage that has no compelling gameplay at all.

If you're looking for cool looking videos, beautiful screenshots and lots of bold promises that to date have always been broken, Star Citizen is a fantastic thing.

They're taking on so much technical debt that most of what they create will either be scrapped or no longer considered cutting edge by the time the game releases. They have a serious case of scope creep.

Star Citizen seems like more of a funding scam than an actual game at this point. The game is "almost done" just need a few million more to finish it! It's like that Oak Island fortune or Twentieth Century Motor Car. Release just enough of a demo to make people excited, but keep actual development to a minimum to drag out investors as long as possible.

I wouldn't call it a scam because it is functional. It's just nowhere near done. It honestly was just too ambitious.

That's how they get you though. Show off a compelling demo and promise the world, but never deliver. Star Citizen is the Moller Skycar of video games.

No man's sky was like that but was redeemed so I'm hoping they're more like that.

I think No Man's Sky was more like Molyneux product. Somewhat there but entirely over hypped. It was thin, but entirely working product by my understanding. Less than promised at the launch though.

They're continuing to sell the game, ships, etc. despite it being clear that they do not have the ability to deliver on even a tiny fraction of what they've promised. It might be vaguely functional in the sense of having a 3d model viewer for ships with a thin veneer of gameplay tacked on, but that is nowhere near the original kickstarter goals [1] let alone the scope creep that has occurred in the ~decade since.

Continuing to accept payment for something they are incapable of delivering (and they are either deliberately misleading customers or so grotesquely incompetent at project/business management that they should not be in charge of a child's lemonade stand let alone more than half a billion USD in funds) is what makes it a scam.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen

How do they claim "no pay to win" when you can literally buy giant ships with real money? Seems like the phrase has lost its meaning.

Maybe it's a typo and should read "no, pay to win" :)

I think they were originally meaning you could grind for any content in the game and still be competitive... I haven't seriously followed the development for many years (just checking in every now and then out of morbid curiosity) so I'm not sure how true that remains.

Is FFVII adjusted for inflation? Because that seems like a lot for a PSX game.

Yes, it's $80M–145M in 1997 dollars.

I thought halo infinite would be up there

I'm surprised how many old games are on here. I think a common refrain is how high development costs have become, but except the outliers, Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Citizen, there doesn't look to be a big development cost difference between modern and old games.

I think a huge aspect of that is simply that very few games have their budgets disclosed.

It also seems like with a couple of outliers, marketing costs have outpaced development costs.

Super Mario Bros 3 is an amusing entry towards the bottom. 0.8M in dev costs (12 people on the credits). 25M in marketing costs. 60M total in todays dollars.

I assume marketing costs for SMB3 includes the making and marketting of The Wizard? IMDB has an estimated $6M for that.

How had I never heard of this movie? Wow, thanks.

Let me know if it's still thanks after you see the movie ;)

Surely League of Legends and World of Warcraft should be at the top of this list?

Surprising that no Blizzard games made the list

WoW $60m for initial release, $200m a couple expacks later. The list is missing many games.

According to this: $63M to develop the original release or World of Warcraft, plus at least $200M more for all the subsequent releases.

https://mmos.com/editorials/most-expensive-mmorpgs-ever-deve...

Total costs of $200M as of 2008:

https://www.wired.com/2008/09/total-operating/

Initial development cost of LoL was, I believe, $12-$15m - not very much.

The amount they've poured into it since then, of course, is astronomical.

Hadn't realized it, but with a budget of 331M, Cyberpunk 2077 almost doubled it's investment already. From the game's Wikipedia page: "It had the biggest digital game launch of all time, selling 10.2 million digital units, and grossing $609 million in digital sales as of 31 December 2020".

> It had the biggest digital game launch of all time

Not hard to do when you lie to people. They simply lied in their marketing about the game in so many aspects. Many features missing that were "promised". A lot of people pre-ordered the game (including me) because we believed their marketing. Then we got a buggy, unplayable game at launch which was missing half the things they lied about. Thank god I was able to get a refund from Sony.

I'm not sure what they lied about (I've noticed that people took the online hype as promises and then were unhappy when it was released without the speculated items), but it was one of my favourite games when it came out on PC and it has only gotten better. It's a shame you had such a bad initial impression.

The person you replied to mentioned a refund from Sony, so we can assume then that they got the PS4 version. Unfortunately, the last-gen console versions of the game were horrendously broken and had major performance problems. I don't blame people for being mad at CDPR for releasing the game on those platforms - the game was clearly not designed for the older platforms and the company took a lot of flak for releasing it on them.

I say all this as someone who has enjoyed the game immensely on PC - it's one of my favorite single player games of all time. It's just a shame that CDPR got greedy and tried to sell it on platforms that couldn't handle it.

I agree, and you're right, they shouldn't have released them on the old consoles - they just weren't build for what the game does - which is incredibly fast loading and data streaming. I wasn't 100% sure because I think you could get a refund on a PS5 as well (though at the time those were few and far between), and 'Many features missing that were "promised"' doesn't sound like a PS4 problem.

CDPR was so high on the success of their previous games that they would have recouped their investment had they released a literal potato. The money came at the cost of the studio's reputation, however.

Which is funny because that’s exactly what they did, by all accounts!

No they didn't. They released a figurative potato. A real potato you could at least eat.

If you take the pre release hype with some salt, and play on a reasonably modern PC, CP2077 is one of the best games I've played.

It does have more than the usual amount of bugs, but they have patched it up so that you can play and enjoy without too much frustration.

Almost everything that's important in a game is well done. The combat, gameplay, story, characters, progression, music, everything is enjoyable.

I think the huge backslash had a lot to do with them lying about it running great on PS4, when it clearly didn't. It barely ran, and often bugged out.

This list is missing Red Dead Redemption 2 which could be the top1 on the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dead_Redemption_2#Developm...

"Analyst estimations place the game's combined development and marketing budget between US$370 million and US$540 million, which would make it one of the most expensive video games to develop."

EDIT: Noticed the unofficial figures list now, and RDR2 is there. Nevermind!

I'd like a list like this but showing how much money was actually spent and required for the game that was released as opposed to how much money was wasted on development hell, marketing, licensing, publisher screw-ups, overinflated salaries, and failed attempts.

A list of companies that managed to waste obscene amounts of money with or without ever producing a finished game is nice, but I was hoping for list that showcased the games which incorporated the most expensive technologies, talent, and resources to achieve something impressive that couldn't have been done for any less at the time.

Such a list probably isn't possible without a lot more honesty in accounting than most game publishers would allow for, but it'd be nice to see the games which really leveraged everything they had to create something amazing for its time by overcoming the massive costs it required.

Game developers do not, as a rule, have "overinflated salaries". They generally work below market rate.

The developer for ET (one of the listed games) got $200,000 for 5 weeks work (in 1982 money), a flight on a private jet to meet Steven Spielberg, and an all-expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii.

Game developers with "overinflated salaries" probably won't be too hard to find when you're talking about the games with the highest development costs.

That's a horrible cherry picked case from a time when you could only have one developer - and this is dwarfed by modern development costs. You just can't compare this one outlier to make any kind of statement.

All of these games are outliers and extreme cases. The idea that the games with the highest development costs would likely have involved people who were overpaid seems unsurprising. The fact that the first game in that list I clicked on brought me to an article saying that one developer (reportedly) was hugely overpaid was just convenient.

According to this, E.T. for the Atari VCS cost more than Half-Life 2, after adjusting for inflation.

Which is noteworthy since the game development was done allegedly over the span of a few weeks [1] ( and hence it was a flop since it was too rushed ). But I'm wondering how you can - in 1982 - spend 22M on game development over a few weeks? Maybe the licensing costs for the ET brand were the biggest expense there...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(vi...

Could also be that the marketing cost is included on that one. It was made by one guy in less than one month, so it's certainly not the actual development.

Could have also included the cost to manufacture the cartridges?

That article led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 which I didn't know about, but is very impressive.

Really, that's amazing. It's a seminal point in video game history. It effectively divides the era of American driven development and Japanese driven development.

Like, I knew this day was coming, when events stop being common culture and start becoming history, but it's still wild to see.

I could believe it was well-known when it happened, but I suspect that most people not in the industry didn't know, or barely noticed. By ten years later, it seems quite unlikely most people would know.

I'm 40, so I was ~1 when it happened. If it had happened when I was 15 I likely would've been paying attention, but by 1997 it was ancient history.

The source for the $22m amount in Wikipedia [1] actually gives that amount as just the licensing cost, which fits the $20-25m figure given in the game's Wikipedia article, from a few other sources. It appears that the Wikipedia list is assuming there were actually no development costs that were significant compared to the licensing.

[1]: https://www.avclub.com/howard-scott-warshaw-1798208406 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(vi...

From the wikipedia article: "Kassar reportedly offered Warshaw US$200,000 and an all-expenses-paid vacation to Hawaii in compensation."

If true, that couldn't have helped. $200,000 for a little over one month's work in the early 80s is crazy enough, but a man can rack up a whole lot of expenses while on vacation in Hawaii.

I think the cost is typically marketing, development and if applicable: licensing and production costs; but for this game specifically it probably also includes returns and disposal costs. It didn’t just fail: it failed so hard it landed in a ditch in Arizona, and for how hard it was pushed, the marketing costs had to have been substantial.

Maybe they counted the cost of making the movie towards the game's marketing budget. Very effective marketing!

My understanding of Realtime Worlds (hence the name) and All Points Bulletin is that management were far too ambitious. All Points Bulletin, one of the more expensive games made even to date, was actually only a side project - a tailored-down, "get to market" attempt at shoveling a product out the door to fund a ludicrous "reality simulator" pipe dream. It showed, as conceptually the game could have been good but it felt completely unfinished to play and was critically panned.

Neither stadia.dev nor Amazon Lumberyard (nee CryEngine) are "games" but I would not be shocked to find either pretty well in the top 10. (and Epic's been at Fortnite for a long time; surely that must be on the list somewhere?)

I really think there's huge opportunities for server-centric gaming, where things like lighting don't need to be run per client. I'm far from scoffing, I think there's huge potential. But it also hasn't really materialized, yet, under these banners.

After reading this I digged up the size of video game industry. It is a staggering $190+ billion enterprise now! I wonder what is the ROI on these infamous games? Would they be multibagger opportunities for the producers? Not that they have to be.

Also, most of the gaming industry caters to mobiles and smaller screens given their sheer number. With the ever increasing computing capabilities of mobiles, I wonder how much more monetisation does it lead to in the medium-to-long term future?

As an example, GTA V is the fastest entertainment product to reach a billion dollars in lifetime revenue. That was shortly after it launched, and it's been out for YEARS now. The ROI on that game (plus GTA Online) is staggering.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider being so high is very surprising to me. I remember it being an average AAA game that sort of came and went without much fanfare.

I feel like Halo Infinite is missing. I believe it cost about 200M to develop

Did FFXV spend about 15 years in development

According to Wikipedia[0]: "The game's development began in 2006 as a PlayStation 3 spin-off titled Final Fantasy Versus XIII"... "After a development period of six years, it was changed to the next mainline title in the series in 2012".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XV

Why would ET cost that much money?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com