What does it cost to make a game.....

[mat1]

Well I've been wondering about this question for a while - " what would it cost to make a game like Oblivion ".

 

This is a purely academic question as I by no means have the capital to start a venture like this. I have googled this question and inevitably the results vary widely, and well... (this may cause some strife) google is a useless resource when answering professional questions - if your after general info it's the best damn thing and should win a Nobel - but unfortunately there are a hell of a lot of opinionated fools making sites that seem profession, yet are essentially worthless.

 

As I don't work in the industry, and when one of my clients comes into the office with a line like "i googled it' I instantly go into damage control mode, I figured one of you must work in the industry and be able to quickly rattle off some info on this topic - eg development costs, overheads etc.

 

By the way if your some 16 year old kid in your room cutting and pasting or relying on your ability to know everything at that enlightened age please don't bother posting just to up your count.

 

I am genuinely interested in this side of Oblivion as it is a somewhat unique game and one of the few with a community as strong as this after a few years - at the very least some one must be getting $US50K a year to maintain the web resource. ....

 

Appreciate your replies.. :thumbsup:

[malonn]

That's an interesting question. I'd like to know what it cost to make Oblivion too. From what I've read, game development costs vary from game to game and platform to platform. How long was the game in development? Did it use a existing engine? Is it cross-platform? Was it developed by a large or small studio? Then the marketing comes into play. But the marketing doesn't interest me. Like you said, the info I could find varies. All I could turn up was a range from $15,000,000 to $30,000,000 average across all platforms. I'm guessing those figures include marketing. I could find nada on Oblivion. But it took 4 years to make, so I'm guessing it falls on the upper-end of the spectrum. Hopefully someone else can turn up the actual figure.

[Vagrant0]

I would imagine it a closely guarded secret that even Bethoft may not actually know. The question is really "Where does cost for a game begin and end?" Quite a bit of the basis for the game was already established with morrowind, so do you count those production costs too? Oblivion has been worked on for many years, by people who work for Dethsoft and aren't always delegated to a single game. They also had to pay licensing fees to various companies for plugins and such (atleast that's their reasoning for locking off parts of the CS). And where do the costs end? They were still doing marketing and translating for other languages until recently, they also released a GOTY version. Then there are all those official plugins. The answer is not a clear figure, and depending on where you start and end what you're counting, the cost can change significantly. The only thing which is known is that they spent enough money to where they had to rush out a slightly broken game, and a very broken expansion. Even if you did have a few million sitting around collecting dust, you probably wouldn't be able to get the same sort of results because you would be starting from scratch while they already had many resources available to them before beginning. Even with the resources, the company would still have to be able to put them to use effectivly. I'm not saying that Oblivion is something which sets the bar for other companies, far from, just that an individual starting out on their own, or even a small company would probably have alot more difficulty trying to match performance. Additionally, the specifics as to what the game is can change costs significantly, so unless you were looking to copy every aspect of Oblivion, any figure would be quite meaningless.