Every so often, someone in the games industry makes a ridiculous claim on what their game costs. In this case, it's the highly anticipated Gears of War for the Xbox 360.
Speaking at the London Games Summit, Rein said that it's taken a team of 20 - 30 people around two years to complete work on GOW - arguing that despite claims by some industry figures, it's still possible to create next-gen titles using medium sized teams and without gigantic budgets.
GOW, he continued, "wasn't cheap but didn't cost the crazy figures you hear other companies quoting of $20, $30 million". Rein made similar comments in an interview with GI.biz last year, where he accused "big companies like EA" of "going around trying to scare people".
When asked by an audience member how much GOW had cost to produce, Rein replied, "So far, around $10 million, maybe a little less.
"The publisher didn't pay much more than that for it... And smart developers don't go over [deadline], let's say that," he added.
Source: gamesindustry.biz
I don't buy it. 10 million barely buys your development team + engine, and possibly office space. Corporate taxes? Insurance? Software Tools? Office Equipment? Computers? Software?
It's true, a lot of software can be done cheaply, but some tools, you HAVE to pay for -- like Maya ($5,000 a copy) or 3D Studio Max ($3,500 each), or Photoshop ($750) -- there's a couple hundred thousand. I don't think they're using gimp or some open source equivalent. There's a lot that goes into the cost of a project -- and then there's the infrastructure to support all that. Let's not forget their office T1 (or T3 -- whatever). 10 million might be what their developers are being paid, but I guarantee you it's not what the project costs.
It’s possible GoW development only cost $10 million. Rein is probably considering engine and tool development a separate cost as Epic use the engine on multiple games and licence it out to other developers.Licences for general software (Max and Photoshop etc.) are another matter. The cost of the licences is probably spread across the budgets for several projects and they probably get a nice corporate discount because of the volume of licences they buy.