A court document from the Microsoft vs. FTC case has revealed more than it intended, with Horizon Forbidden West having a budget of $212 million.
There’s a been a lot of nonsense spoken at the ongoing between Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), by just about everyone involved. Even more if you take into account the 16 months the whole Activision furore has been going on for so far.
Some of the things Microsoft has been saying are frankly absurd, like the promise to get playing , but the award for the dumbest mistake so far goes to Sony: who for the sake of a better pen have accidentally revealed the budgets of their two biggest games.
The figures were supposed to be redacted but the ink used wasn’t strong enough and you can still clearly see the numbers underneath, revealing Horizon Forbidden West had a budget of $212 million (£168m) and Part 2 cost $220 million (£174m) to make.
The obvious takeaway from this is that a big budget Sony first party title costs around $200 million to make, with God Of War Ragnarök presumably coming in at roughly the same amount.
Sony also tried to redact how many people worked on the games, but that can be made out too, with The Last Of Us Part 2 requiring around 200 developers and Horizon Forbidden West having around 300 (the discrepancy is likely due, in part, to Naughty Dog being a more experienced studio).
Sony did great job on the document redactions… not 🙃 — Tom Warren (@tomwarren)
The figures are at the higher end of AAA development costs but they’re not particularly surprising, with $100 million already becoming the standard for big name games last generation.
The amounts don’t seem to include marketing costs, which for movies are usually taken to be half that of the production budget. It’s probably not quite that much for video games yet but you can almost certainly add at least another $50 million to these figures.
Clearly this a lot of money, that increasingly few companies can afford, especially when the rule of thumb is that game production costs double every generation – which is why $200 million for these Sony games isn’t surprising, even though one of them was originally only made for the PlayStation 4.
The obvious problem is that $400 million for next gen games is completely unfeasible under the current way of doing things, which is exactly what former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden .
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