Gaming Top 5 - Part 6 - The Most Expensive Games Ever Made!
It is no big secret that some of the biggest games on the market have some of the biggest development and Marketing budgets, and they are enormously huge, some even putting the best blockbuster films to shame. I did a little digging to find out how much some of the best games actually cost to make.
5 - Deadpool.
The Merc with the mouth is one of the newest characters to spawn out of Marvel Comics, and right from the start, he was a hit. An anti, villain, superhero, chimichanga devouring, 4th wall breaking, ninja, all round crazy person, badass. So it was inevitable that he was gonna end up in a video game of his own in 2013.
The estimated cost is somewhere around the $100 million range. If only they spent that much on the movie, it would be $100 million more awesome.
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4 - Destiny.
Times square was littered with destiny adds for a while, so where many other such places around the world, getting us all hyped up, promising to be one of the best games ever. Only to be drastically torn at how crap it ended up when it was released. With a budget of over $140 million in 2014, you would of expected better. Fortunately however, all the bugs and crap with the story have all been corrected thanks to patches and updates, so the cost was justified, all be it, 3 years later.
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3 - Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Back in December 2011, I made sure I was one of the first to sign up to the new star wars online game which is still going strong today, nearly 6 years later. It was an instant hit.
The $200 million they paid to get this up and running could have been much higher. Thankfully though, the bulk of the games mechanics were already available, they reused some of the coding from a previous title, Knights of the Old Republic, which by itself, was a fantastic game. But the development cost was nothing compared to its younger brother.
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2 - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
the CoD franchise is one of the better, first person shooters currently available, unfortunately this title was not as popular as some of its predecessors in terms of sales and online server population. This version of the CoD series was the most expensive out of all of them. At $250 million, its not hard to see that Activision was expecting the game to do so much better, that is probably the main reason all new CoDs since 2009 have not cost half as much as this one did for both development and marketing.
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1 - Grand Theft Auto V.
When it come to open world gaming, Rockstar is the daddy. Since its release back in 2013, 5 years later and it is still drawing in new players and keeping existing ones entertained. Rockstars first explored the 3D digital world with GTA III back on the old PS1 and they even sell that game now for your phone. It was hugely popular, is it any wonder then that the total cost of the game was upwards of $256 million to develop and market. That should be marketing campaigns... as they put the date back several times before it was finally released. It just sucked that us PC gamers had to wait a further 18 months before we could play it.
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When you think that films such as Star Wars the Force Awakens cost over £245 million to make, or all three of the matrix movies cost under $300 million. Makes you wonder, just how lucrative is the gaming industry really?
In the future I see films and gaming merge to provide the ultimate in entertainment. Something that was tried back in the 70's, almost like a holodeck from star trek.
Thanks for reading.
Stu @TechMojo
Interesting games!! the most interesting thing is that I only played Modern Warfare for those.