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Dead Space 2 cost $60 million to make, sold 4 million copies, underperformed
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
Yeah that would be Dead Space 1, which surpassed RE4.
I'd be curious to hear about how budgets/profits are with the increasing DD for games. Obviously that cuts out quite a bit of middle man expenses, and it's fair to say that DD on consoles for big releases was a much smaller percentage back then compared to now.
Similarly, marketing has heavily shifted from TV to being a mix of traditional and new marketing types(YouTube personalities, streamers, etc.). Is that helping to alleviate marketing costs at all?
Similarly, marketing has heavily shifted from TV to being a mix of traditional and new marketing types(YouTube personalities, streamers, etc.). Is that helping to alleviate marketing costs at all?
The reason studios are there is because the talent pool is there. If you move your studio to the middle of nowhere youll get a lot less people to hire and even less willing to relocate.
That's insanity. Those numbers are just nonsense.
What's even crazier is that they when ahead and made Dead Space 3, probably spending a similar amount of money or even more. Based on what I remember playing the production values looked even higher. No doubt it sold less.
There has to be a lot of waste in that budget. I clearly remember God of War 3 costing like 53M, but at least that game looks it.
What's even crazier is that they when ahead and made Dead Space 3, probably spending a similar amount of money or even more. Based on what I remember playing the production values looked even higher. No doubt it sold less.
There has to be a lot of waste in that budget. I clearly remember God of War 3 costing like 53M, but at least that game looks it.
family_guy
Member
Game devs need to open offices in middle America to have more reasonable budgets.
a bunch of that has to cover benefits
Epic used Unreal Engine, which they then wrote off as they sold it for other studios to use.
Visceral used an in-house engine for the Dead Space games, which adds substantially to the dev cost.
Some Nobody
Junior Member
There's a tweet by Jason in the OP.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Graphics aren't the only reason game development is more expensive.
AndrewDean84xX
Banned
EA doesn't care what others think. They wanted to push MP and likely a season pass and DLC.
Fast Forward
Member
This is why less big budget games are being made these days, and there's been a larger focus on indie titles the last several years.
A game that sold 4+ million by any sense should be a sure fire blockbuster, and yet, it was not a money maker. Economics of seeing a profit from a typical big budget, or "AAA" video game like this are ridiculous.
Reminds me of the ridiculous economics of the original Avengers, which apparently had to make more than a billion dollars before it started to produce a profit.
A game that sold 4+ million by any sense should be a sure fire blockbuster, and yet, it was not a money maker. Economics of seeing a profit from a typical big budget, or "AAA" video game like this are ridiculous.
Reminds me of the ridiculous economics of the original Avengers, which apparently had to make more than a billion dollars before it started to produce a profit.
It was a very small team compared to the main team if you oook at the credits.
Its important to remember that second hand sales were perceived to be a huge reason why many publishers were not hitting sales targets. MP modes got added to games to prevent second hand sales. So thats still a problem with games not making enough money. The idea the publishers had was that the game would have made even less money without MP due to second hand sales.
ethomaz
Banned
Horizon didnt actually cost $47 million, to note. Its just that the previous most expensive Dutch entertainment experience with a known budget cost $47 million, and Sony confirmed their game cost more.
Its very, very likely Horizon was $80-$100+ million.
Moon Presence
Member
Europe is the answer, specially the peripheral countries. Budgets in the US, Canada and Japan are out of control.
Relaxed Muscle
Member
Yeah, let's be honest. RE6 was a massive game.
4 full campaigns, lots of modes, varied scenarios, deep mechanics (one of the characters having unique moveset), etc...
The game could have been easily split into two games...
Since Horizon hasn't even sold the gangbusters 4 million copies (and it is gangbusters) does that mean Horizon likely wasn't profitable?
Anyhow, not being profitable at 4 million is fucking ludicrous.
OrbitalBeard
Member
Oh yeah, this was during the days of the "online pass".
Aside from FFXV, what recent Japanese game has been really out of control on the spending?
GalacticMouse
Member
At first glance it's a bit nuts, but that's not just salary. That's the average cost of running the business per employee.
Let's say you have 100 people each making $75k/year. On top of their salary, you need to add in their benefits like holiday pay ($4k), vacation time ($5k), health insurance ($10k), disability insurance ($5k), etc. All the estimates are rough and I could be missing some benefits, so let's call that $25k/year per employee. Add that to their salary and now we're up to $100k per year per employee.
Now you need a pretty large building to set up 100 employee work stations, probably in a place people want to work (like SoCal). Between kitchen space, hallways, conference rooms, cubicles, offices (larger for executives), and some areas to relax (your developers are going to be pulling a lot of 16 hour days, remember), Let's say each person gets 500 square feet. At an average rate of $32.76/year per square foot in the LA area, you're paying over $1.6m/year for your studio's rent, which adds another $16k per person. Running total now at $116k/person per year.
Now everyone needs some equipment. Probably a pretty heavy duty PC, a few monitors, some discipline specific tools, and of course the software licenses to go along with all of the tech you're using. Maybe when you're all said and done the average high tech workstation costs around $10k and needs to be replaced every three years? That's another $3.3k per employee per year. Running total at $120k/person per year.
That's all the big stuff, but doesn't include things like providing 1-2 meals a day to the studio when you're "asking" everyone to work 18 hour days for the last six months of development time, company outings, morale boosters, work phones and cell plans, etc etc. Basically, when you average out the cost of running a business per employee, an important rule of thumb is 2x Salary, and that's often a business that's running pretty lean with average benefits and a modest workspace outside of prime real estate areas (i.e. nearby suburbs instead of downtown).
FWIW, I'm trying to just use rough numbers on this stuff. I don't work in the gaming industry and some of my assumptions could be off in either direction. Just trying to show the logic between average salary per person and studio run rate per person.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
It's not just salary, but benefits and overhead as well. The standard back-of-page cost per head I was told to use when I worked in government (you can harahar about waste all you want but it was actually for projects outside government) was 100k per person, and obviously most of those people weren't making nearly 100k.
TBH 150k seems like a conservative estimate considering the area and expertise.
Dead Space 2 was also a 2011 game so I'd expect the cost per head to be even more now.
TetraGenesis
Member
But that was the whole thing about Hellblade. They employed a vastly original development model for the express purpose of making an "independent AAA" game. Everything about its design was carefully chosen to accommodate the realities of their relatively small team and resources.
They did things that have never been done before in the pursuit of proving this model is possible.
It is wholly unfair to compare literally any AAA game to Hellblade until other companies start adopting similar models. It's not so much that something went wrong with Dead Space 2 (although that may be true), Hellblade just went very, very right.
ArkhamFantasy
Member
Nirolak, do you know why publishers dont open some studios in the mid west?
You can live comfortably in Oklahoma on 40k a year, thats not an exaggeration.
You can live comfortably in Oklahoma on 40k a year, thats not an exaggeration.
UnemployedVillain
Member
I need to see some receipts. I can believe it costing more, but it seems like you arbitrarily chose a budget
Novel Mike
Member
As others have mentioned I'd really be interested in seeing how that was broken down and what was spent on multiplayer and what not because multiplayer was something no one asked for and no one bothered with so thats a ton of wasted money right there. Also I think this was one of EA's first games to have an online pass as well.
Then I believe it was said the marketing budget was also 60$ million which also just seems excessive, wasn't this the game with the 'your mother hates this game' marketing campaign? I don't think that actually sold the game to literally anyone.
I know a lot of time and effort gets put into these games by hard working developers and publishers but I think a lot of projects like this get mismanaged by higher ups within the company and they somehow think just throwing more money at the project will solve all the problems no matter what crazy thing they want added.
Then I believe it was said the marketing budget was also 60$ million which also just seems excessive, wasn't this the game with the 'your mother hates this game' marketing campaign? I don't think that actually sold the game to literally anyone.
I know a lot of time and effort gets put into these games by hard working developers and publishers but I think a lot of projects like this get mismanaged by higher ups within the company and they somehow think just throwing more money at the project will solve all the problems no matter what crazy thing they want added.
-shadow-
Member
60 million seems insane, though going by some posts their location didn't help much. Doubt the multiplayer helped much either, even if it was helmed by a smaller team, it still added to the overall budget that wasn't needed.
What a time that 4 million sold copies for a horror game isn't enough, that just blows my mind. And then you look at something like the Project Zero/Fatal Frame games and that (thankfully) keeps getting sequels despite the terrible sales.
What a time that 4 million sold copies for a horror game isn't enough, that just blows my mind. And then you look at something like the Project Zero/Fatal Frame games and that (thankfully) keeps getting sequels despite the terrible sales.
Sure, those are no 'AAA', but I'd like that to stay that way.
Mechanized
Member
I wonder how Dead Space 3 did in comparison. The multiplayer surely hurt the bottom line of DS2. Completely unnecessary, but that was the thing at the time. "Put progression based multiplayer in EVERYTHING"
I feel like the elephant in the room is technology. As horsepower increases so does the consumer expectation to utilize that horsepower. It takes teams many orders of magnitude larger than gen 6 to create games of comparable caliber, for example. Even though you have DLC and now loot boxes, it's clear with the dearth of AAA SP games that there is simply no room to breathe. Either the teams and development time shrink dramatically, or the base game price has to increase- and I'm guessing by a LOT- to get the kind of proliferation we had back in the PS1/2 days, for example.
The whole multiplayer component for one.
PumpkinSpice
Banned
Some do but the talent pool isn't there.
Also you might be able to live very comfortably on 40k a year but when you can live elsewhere and make a lot more, massively outsizing the increased cost of living, it's really a no brainer.
Audioboxer
Member
This is all we have to go on
http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2017/03/horizon_zero_dawn_cost_a_reported_e45_million_to_make
Keep in mind Guerilla as they often do made a whole engine from scratch. They've done some sort of partnership with Kojima and Death Stranding which is probably going to produce some sort of revenue/deal.
Then they'll use this engine for sequels and other games, like ND did with the Uncharted engine.
ronaldthump
Member
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
I thought this thread was about Dead Space 3 and was like "oh yeah that game was wack". But Dead Space 2 costing this much is insane for a 2011 release.
One thing to keep in mind about Dead Space 3, is that while the overall game is the same, some scenes play out differently depending on if you're in co-op or not (see this video). You can see from the video that the differences between scenes aren't huge, but would still require the team to re-record new lines or even alter set pieces depending on the number of people playing. I can totally respect Visceral for doing that, because it means if you want to play solo you can have a classic Dead Space experience, whereas playing co-op would tailor the game more towards two players without completely compromising the experience for those who just want singleplayer. That said, it seems like it would have taken much more time and resources to design compared to a game like Gears of War, where the continuous presence of another squadmate means the only difference is whether that character is controlled by the AI or a real person. I don't know how much of an effect this would have had on the budget though, but I can't imagine it was completely irrelevant (though based off what we now know of Dead Space 2, a more traditional experience might not have been profitable either).
Makes sense,47 mil for HZD is nuts.
Goldenroad
Member
I bought it for PS3 and then again for 360 when I found the collectors edition on sale, which I still have sealed in box. So I did my part. Definitely top 10 last gen games for me. Don't forget that game had a tacked on multiplayer mode that no one played and probably took up a huge amount of development resources. Glad EA has learned their lesson and doesn't always have to make multiplayer a priority anymore....::shrug::
CassidyIzABeast
Member
DS2's MP was pretty barebones. I wouldn't be surprised if a very small amount of that 60M went to MP. DS2 was constantly changing areas and every time they shifted locations they did it by flinging Issac there with a grandiose set piece. You can tell they spent a bunch of money on that campaign.
How does that happen?
Uncharted 2 had a ~15 hours high quality singleplayer campaign with some of the most impressive graphics and performance capture of its time + addition of a Multiplayer mode + a COOP mode + Naughty Dog size which is not small at all.
HOW DID DEAD SPACE 2 COST 40 MILLION MORE???
It makes no sense to me.
But then again, Tomb Raider 2013 budget was like the entire Uncharted trilogy... which seems so crazy for me too.
Well Horizon sold almost that much in a few months of release. Those would be basically full price sales, with a large portion being DD. Sony also gets a better percentage of revenue of course.
Fatal Frame has a nice sugar daddy in the form of Nintendo, though with how the games progress, they can get away with repeating a lot of content and assets to help keep the costs way down. It's a completely different scale of economics compared to Dead Space. Hell, I wouldn't at all be shocked if all the Fatal Frame games combined wouldn't cover half the budget of Dead Space 2.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Five years of development, a huge team, huge changes to the underlying tech of the engine, a metric fuckton of asset creation from scratch, etc.
Dead Space 2 was also a 12-15 hour game, and hell even it's set pieces were similarly if not more impressive, and more expensive performance capture since they were also facial capture. It was an incredibly ambitious game.