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Dead Space 2 cost $60 million to make, sold 4 million copies, underperformed

gogosox82

Member
60 U.S. dollars * 4 million =
240 million U.S. dollars


it only cost 60 mil

I don't get it .

Probably not all at full price. All storefronts(steam, psn, xbl) take 30% cut on sale. Plus marketing, distribution, etc. so its probably not hard to see why it wasn't enough but I never expected this game to sell more than 2 million personally because its a niche product.
 

Bronetta

Ask me about the moon landing or the temperature at which jet fuel burns. You may be surprised at what you learn.
Why make Dead Space 3 then?

And why limit it to Origin, preventing it from appearing on the largest PC storefront?

All this says to me is EA is terrible at making business decisions but they coast by with their annual licensed sports shit.
 

nampad

Member
$60m to make, another $60m to market? You get...what, $45 from each copy sold? 4m copies sold...$180m? And that's pushing what they might've gotten from each copy. If they got say, $30m, well. They broke even, which means that game wasn't worth making in EA's eyes.

Yikes. Jason's right.

According to Michael Pachter, the cut was like this in 2011 (if I remember correctly):

60$
=
12$ platform holder
+
12$ retailer
+
36$ publisher

Unfortunately, the Pach Attack episode 111 is down.
 

yamo

Member
Rough estimate but...

4 years x 150k/year expenses per person x 100 people = $60M

EDIT: Just saw that it was 2.5 years of development, so maybe something more like...

2.5 years x 150k/year expenses per person x 160 people = $60M

...or maybe $150k/year expenses are me being conservative on dev costs. California real estate is expensive and artists/programmers have a lot of options there, so maybe salaries and overhead are more competitive and push it closer to $200k/year per person average costs.

The short answer is, $60M doesn't go very far when you're running a large operation.

$150k/year sounds insane to me. But I neither live in the Bay Area or USA.
 
I guess that depends on what the average budget is for AAA games.

No idea, but I'm speaking mainly of the big boys, like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc. Games that require multiple studios, contractors, and hundreds to thousands of employees. The $60 single player game simply won't be feasible with this style of development for much longer, but that doesn't mean the $60 single player game can't exist in other ways.

My guess is most of the biggest studios aren't interested in going the other direction at this point though.
 
Two years of hundreds of people at San Francisco Bay Area salaries and benefits plus all the outsourcing needed to support it.

Not many AAA studios left in the Bay Area these days you'll notice. Crystal Dynamics outsources half their game development to Montreal as one of the few remaining ones.

For whatever reason I just assumed they where up in canada.

Now I am kinda surprised they survived BF Hardline with the costs of running a studio in SF.
 

LQX

Member
Damn shame. The Dead Space franchise is and was amazing. Future, horror, set in space. Loved it.

Think I will start replaying them.
 

Duxxy3

Member
San Francisco has experienced the most real estate inflation of any metro area in the US over the last couple decades.

When they originally located there prices and salaries probably weren’t as bad as they have to be now. Feels like that area is eventually going to have a crash whenever the top tech firms get tired of it and pull out to Texas or somewhere else cheaper.

Austin has been my guess for a while.
 

nampad

Member
$150k/year sounds insane to me. But I neither live in the Bay Area or USA.

That's not only the wage. It includes overhead costs and some other stuff.
Rule of thumb is to double the wage to include all the other costs and 75.000$ doesn't sound like much if the Bay area is as expensive as people make it out to be.
 

Sirhc

Neo Member
Dead Space 2 hit the bomba bin pretty quickly too; payed like € 19 for the PC version two months after launch.

They sold little at full price. I imagine it would be peanuts; but shit, sixty million? Thats nuts.

This really makes you think about the idea of "race to the bottom" with indie prices. It's almost the same with most modern AAA games outside of Nintendo stuff. The $60 dollar price isn't so bad with the larger audience now but when you slash your prices 40-60% in the first several months you need to sell millions more copies. Not to mention how many people wait for sales before buying in now after feeling burned by huge discounts so soon after launch.
 

gogosox82

Member
Why make Dead Space 3 then?

And why limit it to Origin, preventing it from appearing on the largest PC storefront?

All this says to me is EA is terrible at making business decisions but they coast by with their annual licensed sports shit.

DS3 had microtransations and a co op mode.

They were trying to push Origin so that they wouldn't have to give steam the 30% cut on sales.
 

Audioboxer

Member
So you want a AA game instead of triple a , gotcha.

I'm pretty certain The Evil Within didn't give itself a budget of $120 million (development and marketing), and I doubt The Evil Within 2 will have either.

Not every AAA game needs to cost a combined $120 million just because EA made that so with Dead Space 2.
 

Jigorath

Banned
No idea, but I'm speaking mainly of the big boys, like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc. Games that require multiple studios, contractors, and hundreds to thousands of employees.

Yeah that's fair.

I have to imagine the money spent on each Assassin's Creed title is utterly insane given how many studios work on them.
 

fireflame

Member
I enjoyed original Dead Space more than its sequel, that felt more action oreitned and started to be a bit too fast paced for me. I liked original where i could still plan attacks, but after that DS2 and 3 started requesting more reactivity. I did not enjoy the third and did not have courage to complete it.

I did not like artificial gore. For me a horror game should not use too much gore when it is not needed, and with Dead Space agems, it sometimes felt too much, when a mere door whose setttings had gone crazy could cut you. I hope it the elevators of my city ever go bad, they wont have the same issues as Dead Space automated doors.
 

Floody

Member
I wonder if the Platform holder's cut is a big reason only really Sony and Nintendo do big budget SP focused stuff nowadays. Well, compared to the other big players at least, only really Bethesda seem comparable to either when it comes to output and there's evidence they might be joining the rest.
 

gogosox82

Member
I think it probably says something about this line of argument that people have forgotten it, too. Who knows to what extent tacking on unwanted multiplayer inflated the budget and made the problem worse?

Totally forgot about the mp mode. I wonder how much that pushed the price up.
 
Yeah that's fair.

I have to imagine the money spent on each Assassin's Creed title is utterly insane given how many studios work on them.

The worst thing a player can experience is a forced viewing of the end credits to an AC game. Better go make a few sandwiches.
 

nynt9

Member
Maybe publishers should start scaling back budgets. But they won't, so I don't have much sympahy for em.

Have you ever expected a game to have better graphics? More content? More polish? Better writing? If so, you should. Games cost money to make, and the more effort gets put into them, the more they cost. Even something simple like shovel knight would cost less if it had worse artwork and music. But they paid for the talent and it paid off.

And this is all with the exploitation of developers who work 80-100 workweeks. If we want them to be treated fairly, games would cost even more.
 

BiggNife

Member
It's crazy that such a basic game cost $60 million to make. Strikes me as something that would cost half that. It wasn't a very ambitious game in any aspect and the graphics weren't cutting edge for the time either.
Dead Space 2 was not a basic game in 2011

It had production values out the ass and some crazy set pieces. Plus a multiplayer mode no one played.
 

george_us

Member
Dead Space 2 is honestly up there with Resident Evil 4 as two of the greatest survival horror games - a real shame it wasn't a bigger success.
Definitely one of the best games I played last year. Wish EA would release remasters of the first and second.
 

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Would be interesting to see where the budget went into Dead Space 2. Didn't it have a multiplayer mode that nobody asked or cared for? Can't imagine that being a cheap addition to the game.
For titles with MP the campaign is usually what takes up the majority of the budget.

Hahahahaha! It's not the needless overspend, it's because they can't charge more!
What's needless about it given the scope of Dead Space 2?
 
Experienced game developer describes team as being "merciless" with their budget.

But sure, they probably just forgot to hit the "spend less money" button during dev...

It's not the studio itself. It's the advertising budget along with the location. A $60 million budget in San Francisco is $15 million elsewhere. Ridiculously expensive. EA should've moved the studio before this became an issue.
 

mr jones

Ethnicity is not a race!
And this is why we see like a fraction of the AAA games that we used to see released.

The market's refusal to go above the $60 price tag killed games like this.

One of the worst posts on the gaming side.

Big budget videogames aren't 60 dollars anymore. Not complete ones, anyways.

You can make high quality games without spending 60 million dollars.
 
Do you all understand why GaaS, Microtransactions and Lootboxes exist now? It's a product of this very environment. Now, I think a lot can be done to better manage budgets in the AAA space, that's for sure, but gamers are demanding more and more with each passing year. More content, better graphics, better support. It doesn't come cheap and when you consider that games haven't actually increased in price since the 90s but cost 10x the amount to develop, it puts things into perspective.

Before you go and rant about how developers are trying to fuck you over with games as a service and Microtransactions, think about the bigger picture. This is a very complex issue.
 

Qwark

Member
Hope that "Your mother hates Dead Space 2" marketing campaign was worth it

Maybe I have a really dumb sense of humor, but I loved that ad campaign. I probably wouldn't have even tried Dead Space if my group of friends didn't keep quoting the "gooey" lady.
 

Pastry

Banned
It's not the studio itself. It's the advertising budget along with the location. A $60 million budget in San Francisco is $15 million elsewhere. Ridiculously expensive. EA should've moved the studio before this became an issue.

You act like moving a studio is just the snap of a finger
 
I'm pretty certain The Evil Within didn't give itself a budget of $120 million (development and marketing), and I doubt The Evil Within 2 will have either.

Not every AAA game needs to cost a combined $120 million just because EA made that so with Dead Space 2.

You're comparing two totally different games with different cities and different development plans. I'm not privry for the final cost of evil within 2 , I'm sure it's the same as every other average aaa game

There’s no reason why a game like Dead Space couldn’t still succeed on a AA scale

It’d be different but that doesn’t mean it would be bad or worse

Best solution would be for ea to close all north american studios and move to cheaper cost of living countries if we don't want microtransactions at this point
 
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