Grand Theft Auto V Cost Nearly $267 Million

[antidonkey]

While 25 million is certainly a lot of copies to sell, word has it that GTA4 has sold 25 million copies. Perhaps this goal isn't quite as insane as it seems. Regardless, the game looks good. Hopefully I'll be able to get in to this one as something about 4 just didn't sit well with me. I've had my friend's copy for 2 years now and have only managed maybe 3 hours of playtime.

 

[sth1729]

Rockstar will make this back several times over. My biggest guess at the development cost are server farms for GTA online and the creation, modification and optimization of the game engine.

A) Server farms, no matter how costly, only add up to about 5-10 million, tops. And that's if you buy from IBM and take their POWER7+ lineup of processors, octa-core exclusively and look for quite the server farms.
B) Optimisation of the engine to existing consoles might have been going on, but it only takes tons of time and testing. You can't just throw more money at it and get it done faster with more people. Just doesn't work. You can have more testers, but there's a limit to how many are useful here too.

Is that for a single server farm? because for something like gtaV i'd think they'd have about 8-9 globally to keep latency down.

 

[Matthi205]

Rockstar will make this back several times over. My biggest guess at the development cost are server farms for GTA online and the creation, modification and optimization of the game engine.

A) Server farms, no matter how costly, only add up to about 5-10 million, tops. And that's if you buy from IBM and take their POWER7+ lineup of processors, octa-core exclusively and look for quite the server farms.
B) Optimisation of the engine to existing consoles might have been going on, but it only takes tons of time and testing. You can't just throw more money at it and get it done faster with more people. Just doesn't work. You can have more testers, but there's a limit to how many are useful here too.

Is that for a single server farm? because for something like GTA V i'd think they'd have about 8-9 globally to keep latency down.

Depends on how they're going to implement it. If the system in question is a system where everybody can host a game at home, then the server farms required will have no problems staying below even $1 Million. This would be more of a BitTorrent-type sync system, which would be light on processing power and problems, with the "Tracker" (server) just telling client A the IP address of clients B,C,D, etc. and keeping a peer list. This solution would have each client receiving data about what is going on, but computing it itself as if it was something that happened in the game, basically treating other player characters as remote-controlled AI.

I did the numbers again, and $10 million are probably not going to cover traditional multiplayer game servers (world wide of course). Those numbers look to be more in the $10-$20 million range, maybe a bit more (depending on how many players re going to be active at a time). This type of solution produces less possible bugs, but it has the drawback of requiring most world events (for example, blowing an airplane up, or AI) to be calculated on the server's side.

 

[FogHornG36]

shut up about the pc port, they are not doing it right away because they want to see big numbers on release, and as much as i hate the argument about piracy, if there was a pc port, it would be on the Internets the day before release somehow, and it would take a bite out of the first day/week/month sales.

The budget is big because they are licensing music, as well as months worth of voice acting for the game as well as the in game radio, the budget is big because this is going to be a big game, with a big world.

Shut up already. Consoles don't account for the kinds of numbers they want to sell. Now you're probably going to give the CoD example. I know tons of people that play CoD on PC, some even owning a console.
Not releasing a PC version together with the console version is just plain stupid, no way around that. There's no way GTA V is going to sell this many copies without a PC version. It just isn't possible. There are non-gamers that like to play GTA, and they don't even own a console. Yet they still seem excited about GTA V. They got to know GTA through GTA:SA and had tons of fun playing it on whatever PC they had (HINT: The installed userbase for PCs is nothing short of ridiculous: over a billion). I don't see those people ever buying a console just to play one game from time to time.

As for how many people with modded consoles I know: about 50-60 off the top of my head. It's pretty rare NOT to have a modded console - if you own a console - in this country.

Yes and i know 50-60 people who have seen unicorns, don't bull-shit me you don't even "know" 50-60 people unless they are people you met on a forum on how to mod consoles.

You bring up GTA:SA and how popular it is on pc, guess what, it didn't get a pc port on release! it was only a year later that a port was released. So as much as everyone wants to play it on pc, we will go wanting.

 

[Matthi205]

-snipped for space-

-snipped for space-

Yes and i know 50-60 people who have seen unicorns, don't bull-shit me you don't even "know" 50-60 people unless they are people you met on a forum on how to mod consoles.

You bring up GTA:SA and how popular it is on pc, guess what, it didn't get a pc port on release! it was only a year later that a port was released. So as much as everyone wants to play it on pc, we will go wanting.

That is about the number of people in my school[footnote]~3500 students[/footnote] that own consoles, plus about 5 who own non-hacked ones (or without a chip, for Playstations).
I was referring to GTA:SA to prove my argument about GTA's popularity. I was not talking about how many copies it sold close to release, but how many people still play the game, enjoy doing so and know the GTA brand. I was also pointing out that these people are not going to buy GTA V for any platform but Windows[footnote]System requirements should not be a problem, since the game is being ported from the 7th console generation and will likely be a little bit better optimised than GTA IV was - which now runs more or less OK on the average person's PC, provided they have any kind of graphics card.[/footnote].

 

[Demandred20]

And the really depressing part about those figures is that probably two thirds of that budget was blown at marketing. Last night I was at the movies and for the first time in my life I saw game advertising before the movie and this was before an audience that probably couldnt care less in the back end of nowhere country. And the flipping fun part was that it was advertising it as a PS4 game which last I checked is due in 6 months.....I´m starting to wonder what the cost/benefit ratio is to all this AAA marketing.

 

[djl3485]

And the really depressing part about those figures is that probably two thirds of that budget was blown at marketing. Last night I was at the movies and for the first time in my life I saw game advertising before the movie and this was before an audience that probably couldnt care less in the back end of nowhere country. And the flipping fun part was that it was advertising it as a PS4 game which last I checked is due in 6 months.....I´m starting to wonder what the cost/benefit ratio is to all this AAA marketing.

Exactly, the people who buy these games already know about it, I mean the games get good enough exposure through the games media (IGN, Gameinformer, etc.) and that's all for free. So spending 100m to target who?

 

[V TheSystem V]

The good news, at least from Take Two's perspective, is that the site also claims "industry experts" are predicting that the new GTA could move [HEADING=1]25 million copies[/HEADING] in its first year of release...

That's a good one. Good-golly-gracious, me.

Now, I know the franchise is really gosh-darn popular, but c'mon, that's crazy. They're shooting for CoD numbers there.

There's not as big a gap as you think, the last two main stream titles sold 20 million a piece outselling CoD IV and the two before that were hitting 15 million, all of which outsold CoD IV and CoD: World at War which were being sold at roughly the same sort of time.


So it's got a fairly reasonable shot at beating CoD, considering how many more console gamers there are out there now since GTA IV came out

Just realised that since the last GTA game, we've had the Modern Warfare franchise beginning and ending, another jab at a WW2 shooter, and two Black Ops games in the same franchise. Sweet Jesus.

 

[Dragonbums]

Even blasted movies are criticized for costing that much money to develop.

God Speed Rockstar.

With a budget like that, even if the game sold great in comparison to others, it may not put much of a dent into the monstrosity that is that budget.

I don't know. If the game sold as well as GTA IV, Vice City or San Andreas each did then that would be 20 million copies sold.

20 million x $60 is $1200 million makes back the budget with a little to spare ;P Even with the 2/3's going to Sony/Microsoft/Retailers that's still $170 million pounds profit.

Heck, if it sells worse than any other main franchise GTA since GTA II, only as well as the PSP spin-off (10 million copies), that's still a tidy $600 million.

It's incredible how well the franchise does when you think about it.

I guess so. But just because you make that much money in return. Doesn't mean that you spend that much money. It's wasting money for the sake of saying "Hey. Look how much money we can spend on a game.
And as others said before, many a studio sunk because they put money into one game not even a fraction of this budget.

 

[BrotherRool]

I guess so. But just because you make that much money in return. Doesn't mean that you spend that much money. It's wasting money for the sake of saying "Hey. Look how much money we can spend on a game.
And as others said before, many a studio sunk because they put money into one game not even a fraction of this budget.

That is true, but this isn't a new situation for the franchise either. GTA IV had the most expensive budget of all time when it was released and was twice as expensive as even the 5th most expensive game.

For a long time the publisher was basically solely reliant on GTA selling well, it was a bit of a gamble, but I guess the only real way they could break out of that cycle was if one GTA game made enough money to finance several other franchises.

I also reckon they're working on the strategy that if they keep the budgets high they can absolutely crush any competition and keep the sandbox market to them selves. Saints Row only survived by going it's own way and finding a new niche and it's had to imagine any game could steal GTA's crown considering they probably only have 1/4 of the budget.

But I agree it's a huge risk.

 

[Kittyhawk]

Rockstar get high on wanting GTA to aspire to movie like sales and quality. Thing is Rockstar take so long over these games that the games industry has shifted so much since GTAIV. That development budget is way inflated.

Sorry, don't care about your track list, don't care how many buildings you've got.

No, I'm going to support smaller efforts like Payday 2, that actually want to offer me something different. The age of the big budget game has passed for me, as they just want to flog the same/similar horse. And if I do go big budget, it'll be for BF4, CoD, games with better online play.

Best thing Rockstar did of late was Red Dead.

Anyway, if you love GTAV buy and enjoy it.