Game budget.

[Ryu Hayabusa]

I have heard that the game budget is exceeding 150 million USD due to high staff turnover and lengthy development process. The game has been in development since 2015 lmao. I would appreciate if somebody can confirm this figure with links please.

[Ryu Hayabusa]

Originally posted by Skyfall_25:

I'm not sure if $100 million is only for the veilguard or if it includes the budget for the cancelled dreadwolf version. Remember it's not just a simple name change. Solas was the game's focal point before and a lot of it was reworked to focus on the veilguard. That can't have been cheap.

Add to the fact the game had multiple directors and Hans Zimmer as a composer. Zimmer ain't cheap for sure my guy.

[Centisteed]

LOL. It hasn't been 10 years. They pulled the bulk of resources to work on crappy Anthem, cut short ME:Andromeda DLC.

I figure it has been 5 years at most and there might've been some dabbling in the years before, but they didn't have the money or resources to work on it (due to the all hands on deck for Anthem World(c), the game nobody wanted nor asked for).

I tell you, the Anthem game just put Bioware into a multi-year time-warp before we finally find ourselves back to Dragon Age and Mass Effect (hopefully).

[NewYears1978]

Originally posted by Centisteed:

LOL. It hasn't been 10 years. They pulled the bulk of resources to work on crappy Anthem, cut short ME:Andromeda DLC.

I figure it has been 5 years at most and there might've been some dabbling in the years before, but they didn't have the money or resources to work on it (due to the all hands on deck for Anthem World(c), the game nobody wanted nor asked for).

I tell you, the Anthem game just put Bioware into a multi-year time-warp before we finally find ourselves back to Dragon Age and Mass Effect (hopefully).

Are you saying this game wasn't in development for 10 years? It was. Maybe not fully active but it surely was. It took this long because it was supposed to be a live service game. Then the gaming industry made a hard stance against it and they paused the project and then brought it back with a new plan and staff and all that.

So it has been in development for 10 years..even if some people may or may not have been pulled off of it for some of the time.

[Drake Ravenwolf]

Personally I think it cost WAY more than 200M, but if we use that as the low estimate; the base game is $60, and Steam takes 30% iirc so $42 * X = 200M, solve for X and... they'd need to sell at least 4.8 million copies to make back 200M, but again I wouldn't be surprised if it was double that given that it was in development for 9 years vs DAI's 3 years

[Drake Ravenwolf]

Originally posted by AdahnGorion:

The game is not 60 for all regions.
Steam only take 20% if you revenue is high enough and yes cuts are from revenue, not singular copies

One adjustment lowers the value per sale and the other raises the value per sale - thus the estimate is still potentially a decent one

[Captain Spaulding]

The average salary for a game dev is ~116k per year now in the US; one could assume that the average for the whole cycle this was in development was maybe 100k. Bioware had ~400 employees a few years ago, from what I could find. Of course, not all are devs, but then again, you also have bosses, so we can assume an average salary around this level (though the average is probably higher as the top end tends to bring the average much higher when you look at earnings in general). Also, not all 400 probably worked on this game for the whole 8-9-10 years. Maybe we can assume that an average of 300 out of the 400 were attached/tied to this project. Now do 300 employees times 100,000 dollars times 12 times 9 years and year and you get 270 million. And this is with some pretty generous assumptions on my part. Me thinks 200-250 is the low end, and then you have marketing and so on (it probably wasn't cheap to fly over many dozens of "journalists" and "influencers" to pump up your game). So this likely cost at least 200-250 million even before factoring in marketing costs, but more realistically, it probably is over 300, maybe even over 400 million (but that's stretching it)...

[DaniTheHero]

What’s certain there’s no way they’ll make enough sales to make this a commercial success with such a high budget

[Jesus Is King]

Originally posted by Ryu Hayabusa:

I have heard that the game budget is exceeding 150 million USD due to high staff turnover and lengthy development process. The game has been in development since 2015 lmao. I would appreciate if somebody can confirm this figure with links please.

Jesus so this game is gonna need to sell at least 5 million copies to at least break even ?

Rumour is it is tracking allot worse that outlaws that sold just over a million ?

[DaniTheHero]

Originally posted by Tijger:

Originally posted by Oxlorne:

As long as the annual sports scam games continue to sell.

Which doesnt change the facts, EA isnt burning money but making it, it operates in a broad spectrum of gaming which all contributes, some games are money spinners, others fail but in general they're profitable.

Making profitable games is for the sake of making profits, not to offset and fund money sink flops.

[Wither]

EA has history of not release what fans want to buy, but what they want to sell.

[Iso Koala]

Originally posted by Drake Ravenwolf:

Personally I think it cost WAY more than 200M, but if we use that as the low estimate; the base game is $60, and Steam takes 30% iirc so $42 * X = 200M, solve for X and... they'd need to sell at least 4.8 million copies to make back 200M, but again I wouldn't be surprised if it was double that given that it was in development for 9 years vs DAI's 3 years

Your assumptions are not correct.

-1st of all. Besides the Steam cut of 30% (which is NOT 30% for all games, big developers have it bit cheaper), there is also regional pricing, and SALES TAX that in Europe are over 20%. 60USD gives around 35USD revenue to the devs on avarage, not 42.

-Studio of 200 people have costs around 20million USD per year, including salaries, office costs, software, electricity, etc. So 5 years would be 100M, and 10 years 200M. SO for that time period 200M would be quite correct. HOWEVER. We dont know how many people have been in the team. Its normal in game development, that first year there is only like 5-10 people, second year like 50-100, and the big team is brought only when there is like 2 years of development left, and then the teams can grow to even 400+ members. But its EXTREMELY unlikely, that they would have full team working on this for 9 years.

If the Team size was around 200 people, actively working avarage 5 years, the cost would be around 100M+10-20M for outsourcing, assets, cgi videos, etc. For that, they would need to sell around 3-3.5M copies to start gaining profits. 200M would require 6+M.

[Ryu Hayabusa]

Originally posted by Iso Koala:

Originally posted by Drake Ravenwolf:

Personally I think it cost WAY more than 200M, but if we use that as the low estimate; the base game is $60, and Steam takes 30% iirc so $42 * X = 200M, solve for X and... they'd need to sell at least 4.8 million copies to make back 200M, but again I wouldn't be surprised if it was double that given that it was in development for 9 years vs DAI's 3 years

Your assumptions are not correct.

-1st of all. Besides the Steam cut of 30% (which is NOT 30% for all games, big developers have it bit cheaper), there is also regional pricing, and SALES TAX that in Europe are over 20%. 60USD gives around 35USD revenue to the devs on avarage, not 42.

-Studio of 200 people have costs around 20million USD per year, including salaries, office costs, software, electricity, etc. So 5 years would be 100M, and 10 years 200M. SO for that time period 200M would be quite correct. HOWEVER. We dont know how many people have been in the team. Its normal in game development, that first year there is only like 5-10 people, second year like 50-100, and the big team is brought only when there is like 2 years of development left, and then the teams can grow to even 400+ members. But its EXTREMELY unlikely, that they would have full team working on this for 9 years.

If the Team size was around 200 people, actively working avarage 5 years, the cost would be around 100M+10-20M for outsourcing, assets, cgi videos, etc. For that, they would need to sell around 3-3.5M copies to start gaining profits. 200M would require 6+M.

Is there a way to know exactly the amount of money EA spent on this game ?

[rodrigo.k.o]

Originally posted by Captain Spaulding:

The average salary for a game dev is ~116k per year now in the US; one could assume that the average for the whole cycle this was in development was maybe 100k. Bioware had ~400 employees a few years ago, from what I could find. Of course, not all are devs, but then again, you also have bosses, so we can assume an average salary around this level (though the average is probably higher as the top end tends to bring the average much higher when you look at earnings in general). Also, not all 400 probably worked on this game for the whole 8-9-10 years. Maybe we can assume that an average of 300 out of the 400 were attached/tied to this project. Now do 300 employees times 100,000 dollars times 12 times 9 years and year and you get 270 million. And this is with some pretty generous assumptions on my part. Me thinks 200-250 is the low end, and then you have marketing and so on (it probably wasn't cheap to fly over many dozens of "journalists" and "influencers" to pump up your game). So this likely cost at least 200-250 million even before factoring in marketing costs, but more realistically, it probably is over 300, maybe even over 400 million (but that's stretching it)...

Wrong. This game has not been in development for nine years. Production only started in 2019, so you can cut those expenses in half. Before that, only 20 people were working on the concept and prototype. And even then, they were also working on the Inquisition DLCs and helping with Anthem. I think, in total, this game has been in development for 6 years, with 2 of those years involving only 20 people.
Keep in mind as well that BioWare is not as large compared to other developers. As an example, Larian has more developers today than BioWare.

[Ka-mai19]

OP asked for links and literally nobody added links, lol.