Can anyone give me some insight into how much money is involved with making a video game?
I am just a curious little thing sorry.
If you look at Rift from Trion roughly 50 million give or take just to build it then launch. Roughly another 70 million if the game takes off as servers are not cheap.
I think SWToR was like 250 million? They had a insane amount of voice acting so that was definitely not cheap.
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You could make a video game for anywhere from free to millions of dollars.
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It honestly depends on the scale of the game being made. Like movies, video game budgets can vary from really cheap to blockbuster expensive. Something like WoW costs a ton to make with all of the unique art, music, and systems the game has.
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Holy cow batman,
Depends on the game itself. Triple A vs Indie, MMO vs Single Player experience, Console vs PC.
There are a lot of factors.
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I don’t know about WoW but guessing from the quality from BfA, I’m going to say about 10 or 12 thousand dollars, and that’s after most of the writing for BfA was outsourced to grade school kids.
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i know the guy who developed ‘Enter the Gungeon’. It has sold 800,000 units so far. While he did actually work for one of the main video game companies, he couldn’t get them to fund his idea. He basically had two friends help him program and write everything, but it was too much work, so they finally found an investor that basically provided them with approximately a year and a half of salaries, so they could work on it full time. it ended up being a success. i don’t know what that year and a half of salaries was, but my wild guess is $250,000, but the marketing would have been much more than that. i never asked how much $ it was to develop.
the developers name is Dave Crooks, Founder and Designer, Dodge Roll
A Triple AAA title? $50-$100 million dollars. An expansion like BFA, probably $20-$50 million. That is if you don’t count infrastructure. Some new games have Blockbuster Movie size budgets.
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And that probably made it cheaper. They were their own R&D and programmers. A lot of costs go into those 2 main things. The planning and the coding.
Mobile games would be the “cheapest”
Free - learn to program, build it yourself using Unity.
0-$1,000 - hire a super cheap programmer to make a super simple game. Mostly a rip off of some other game. Probably won’t be very good.
$5000–$15,000 - hire a dev shop.
$15,000–$50,000 - this is the level where the games start to become what most people would expect. Facebook login, tracking high scores etc. But still this would be cheap.
$50,000–$150,000 - Take a look through the most funded Mobile games on Kickstarter.
$150,000–2 million - lots of big name games cost a ton of money to create.
Sadly mobile games seem to be where big gaming company’s want to move to because of the low cost high payout micro transaction model.
Games like Fortnite for example cost less then a $100,000 to create but brought in $126 million in February 2018, $223 million in March 2018 and $296 million in April 2018.