Video game budgets are soaring, with Gears of War: E-Day reported to cost over $400 million. To break even, the game might need to sell around 5.7 million copies, a significant challenge.
  • 64bithero@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 hours

    How much money is spent on a game and how much time no longer impresses me. It’s how the time and money is spent. Much can be wasted both on dead ends and bad ideas.

    I remember Heart Of Darkness being advertised as a game 5 years in the making. From what I remember it didn’t sell well. And of course there is also Duke Nukem Forever.

    Hope the game is a success last thing I want to see is another large studio with layoffs

  • popcar2@piefed.caEnglish
    4 hours

    400 million is INSANE. Gears of War is a fairly known franchise but it’s not nearly popular enough to justify such a huge budget, especially when it’s a console exclusive. Battlefield 6 reportedly targeted a $400 million budget, but that’s battlefield. Microsoft has to be one of the worst managed companies in the world to keep running Xbox to the ground like this.

  • mrfriki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9 hours

    390 million on marketing and upper management bonuses and 10 million on the game itself. Probably.

    • sblxck@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6 hours

      I believe it. Honestly, from the trailer I saw, this kind of budget makes no sense

    • 0li0li@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8 hours

      First I hear of it, so marketing hasn’t done enough for it yet it seems lol

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8 hours

        A comment like this happens on threads here no matter how big the game is. Perhaps it’s reflective of a Lemmy bubble we can put ourselves in; perhaps it’s just easier to avoid advertising these days; maybe it’s something else entirely. But marketing is for sure being spent on Gears of War.

        • Aielman15@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7 hours

          I think Lemmy users are more probable to skip Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo events than most, since 99% of the userbase of this site is a Steam user.

          • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7 hours

            I don’t own any of those consoles either, but they’re often chock full of third party releases, since the console manufacturers’ output declined so much in the past 15 years.

  • commander@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 hours

    If true, they’d have to sell a lot more than 5.7 million copies in consideration of non-Xbox digital store sales cuts and physical retailer logistics, currency conversions and regional pricing differences, payment processor fees, discounts/gamepass, taxes, etc. If the budget is $400 million, it’d have to be the best selling Gears game ever probably by a substantial margin to break even with a $400 million budget

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    9 hours

    Gosh that’s huge and is a big risk!

    I loved the first Gears of War and am looking forward to repoaying it on my Steam Deck once my backlog is cleared, but I feel like the franchise is loosing traction.

    As long as I’m not the one paying the 400 millions, I don’t really care, but such an amount for such a game sounds unhealthy.

  • thingsiplay@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7 hours

    Without the Playstation platform, this will be hard to reach goal. I guess as a prime XBOX game it will sell well on the console at least. And Steam… yeah that’s a goldmine. I think the budget ballooned like this, with the Playstation in mind. And Asha surely knows this and will judge accordingly.