Video Game Budget
Today’s “Quadruple A” games, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3, and Gran Turismo 5 have stratospheric development budgets of $50 to $60 million. Grand Theft Auto 4 has even been reported as having a development budget of a $100 million. With marketing costs factored in, CoD: MW2′s budget is a reported $200 million!
Ambitious “triple A” games built to establish a new franchise, such as Bioshock or Mirror’s Edge, range in the $20 to $30 million budget. These games have the potential to grow into major new franchises, and their budget reflects that.
Historically, software development budgets have increased by an order of magnitude with each console generation. In the Super Nintendo/Genesis era, a big budget game was in the range of $300,000. By the GameCube/PS2 era, games were in the $10 million range with top-tier games like Final Fantasy warranting a $40 million budget.
Read Can Software Developers Keep Up? to see comparison between video game budget and movie budget; or read from the beginning: Opinion: AMD, Intel, And Nvidia In The Next Ten Years.
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