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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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