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"The very first Gears of War game cost $12 million to develop, and it made about $100 million in revenue," he says. "It was very profitable."
But those profits continued to shrink as the cost to make each proceeding game went up and the revenue generally didn’t.
"By the end of the cycle, Gears of War 3 cost about four or five times more than the original to make," he says. "The profit was shrinking and shrinking. We calculated that, if we built Gears of War 4, the budget would have been well over $100 million, and if it was a huge success, we could break even. Anything less could put us out of business.
"That’s what caused us to move and change business models."
It wasn’t just Gears 4 that pushed that change; it was also issues that arose while working on Gears of War: Judgment.
"When we released Gears of War: Judgment, a bunch of community players were complaining about all the multiplayer levels we created. We realized that, you know, there are some problems with this, we should rework it, create a bunch of new content and release multiplayer around a new game just like we did in the project that was the genesis of Unreal Tournament," Sweeney says. "We had all these plans to do this, and so we went to Microsoft and we said, ‘Hey, we want to do this.’ And they said ‘No, you don't want to do that.’
"We weren't asking them for money, but you know as our publisher and proprietor of Xbox, it didn't fit into their business plans and so they said no. That made me realize very clearly the risk of having a publisher or anybody standing between game developers and gamers — and how toxic and destructive that process could be to the health of a game and its community."
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