RPG Development Budgets

[ironyuri]

Dear bros,

I've been trying to find out a rough budget / development cost for some of our favourite RPGs. Does anyone have any information on what rpgs such as:

Arcanum
Fallout
Baldur's Gate 1 OR 2
Icewind Dale 1 OR 2
Planescape
(from the 90s-early 2000s era)

Realms of Arkania
King of Dragon Pass
Ultima 4 thru 8
Darklands
Wasteland
Bard's Tale
(from the early-mid 90s era)

Cost? I'm curious about development costs for games, especially the cost of a game such as Arcanum for overall development, in relation to the current PE and Wasteland 2 kickstarter budgets.

 

[Azalin]

I believe Fallut had a budget of 3 millions,don't know about any of the others

 

[Raygun_elf]

I believe Fallut had a budget of 3 millions,don't know about any of the others

I wonder how much of it was voice-acting costs, and how much it cost to make those FMV movies in Fallout (couldn't have been cheap in 1997).

 

[Infinitron]

I read somewhere here that Baldur's Gate budget was 4.5 million. Don't know what the source is.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Presumably they have. The question is if they want to risk it.

 

[Captain Shrek]

So presumably inXile and Obsidian have working capital that they can invest in their projects over and above what is garnered through kickstarter?

Or that costs have gone down since then. Also, no license.

 

[Jarpie]

Obsidian can save a lot of money on not doing the cutscenes and not doing the 3D game (like Alpha Protocol). I'd be ready to bet that most of the game budgets goes to 3D modeling and cutscenes on your regular 3D Third-/first-person games.

I seem to remember reading that budget for BG2 was 5-7 million but can't remember the source.

 

[Infinitron]

Games in the late 80's had budgets in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

[Jarpie]

I'm fairly sure games in the 80's had budgets in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yeah, sounds very realistic. I think big change in budgets came in the early 90s with the increased computing power, (S)VGA and especially CDROM, also games grew to become more "sophisticated" from the 80s.

 

[Azalin]

Games in the 80's had budgets in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Schafer during his kickstarter campaign mentioned the Day of the Tentacle cost 600k in 1993(300 for the game,300 for the voice acting),presumably on the 80's the budget were lower than that

 

[Infinitron]

Games in the 80's had budgets in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Schafer in during his kickstarter campaign mentioned the Day of the Tentacle cost 600k in 1993(300 for the game,300 for the voice acting),presumably on the 80's the budget were lower than that

Well it depends on the genre, but yes, for many games it could have been as low as tens of thousands of dollars.

 

[HobGoblin42]

I don't exactly know why but this kind of information is usually heavily protected by the NDA between developer and publisher. That's why you rarely find proven development budgets. Even public companies like EA or Ubisoft use to hide this numbers from their shareholders.

And don't believe their press releases regarding budgets - those numbers are just for marketing purposes.

 

[ghostdog]

In Fallout it was the talking heads that cost the most IIRC.

 

[Roguey]

Both Brian Fargo and Tim Cain in his Fallout post-mortem have said that Fallout cost over $3 million. Someone recently asked Urquhart about the IE games' budget in the Kickstarter comments thread and he said that was NDA-protected though it's possible it might have expired. Though $4-5 million for BG sounds reasonable particularly since Fallout was a B game with a higher-than-normal B-game budget.

Ultima 7 cost a million: http://web.archive.org/web/20110512211145/http://www.uo.com/archive/ftp/text/intrview/richgar.txt

G: "It's far differnet. Ultima VII cost $1,000,000 to develop. When
you're spending that kinda money, it's a very serious business. Also,
my musical and artistic skills used to be adequate back then for the
marketplace. The audio-visual impact is a lot more important now.
It's why the Wing Commander games were instant runaway hits when they
were released."

T: "What do you think your chances are of recovering that $1,000,000?"

G: "We recovered that on day one. We needed 50,000 back orders to
break even. We had 60,000 the day it was released. It's the biggest
rollout we've ever had."

Darklands cost $3 million as per this Matt Chat interview: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/100167-darklands-video-interview-part-one.html

 

[Roguey]

Do you have any information on Arcanum? I tried searching terra arcanum and google

No, but I imagine it had a lower budget than Fallout considering the team was about a dozen people at its very largest, and they didn't have any talking heads.

Edit for fun: Troika's team info from Arcanum's official site as of 2001: http://www.terra-arcanum.com/sierra/developers/developers-bios.html

 

[Azalin]

Darklands cost $3 million as per this Matt Chat interview: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/100167-darklands-video-interview-part-one.html

Wow,3 mill for a game in 1992 was a huge budget,hell as you said Ultima 7 cost 1 mill and it was a very high profile game,I am impressed they invested so much in a game

 

[Jarpie]

Both Brian Fargo and Tim Cain in his Fallout post-mortem have said that Fallout cost over $3 million. Someone recently asked Urquhart about the IE games' budget in the Kickstarter comments thread and he said that was NDA-protected though it's possible it might have expired. Though $4-5 million for BG sounds reasonable particularly since Fallout was a B game with a higher-than-normal B-game budget.

Ultima 7 cost a million: http://web.archive.org/web/20110512211145/http://www.uo.com/archive/ftp/text/intrview/richgar.txt

G: "It's far differnet. Ultima VII cost $1,000,000 to develop. When
you're spending that kinda money, it's a very serious business. Also,
my musical and artistic skills used to be adequate back then for the
marketplace. The audio-visual impact is a lot more important now.
It's why the Wing Commander games were instant runaway hits when they
were released."

T: "What do you think your chances are of recovering that $1,000,000?"

G: "We recovered that on day one. We needed 50,000 back orders to
break even. We had 60,000 the day it was released. It's the biggest
rollout we've ever had."

Darklands cost $3 million as per this Matt Chat interview: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/100167-darklands-video-interview-part-one.html

Breaking even on the day one takes away some credibility from the comments what Garriott made that they had to sell out to EA due financial issues.

 

[Roguey]

Breaking even on the day one takes away some credibility from the comments what Garriott made that they had to sell out to EA due financial issues.

Ultima 7's success might not have been enough to make up for other games that bombed.

 

[Infinitron]

IIRC the reason Origin had to sell out was prohibitively high distribution costs. In particular, the rising number of floppy disks their games required.

 

[Jarpie]

Breaking even on the day one takes away some credibility from the comments what Garriott made that they had to sell out to EA due financial issues.

Ultima 7's success might not have been enough to make up for other games that bombed.

Maybe not, and I doubt Garriott regrets selling Origin though.

 

[Infinitron]

IIRC the reason Origin had to sell out was prohibitively high distribution costs. In particular, the rising number of floppy disks their games required.

garriott can into space but not compact disc

I think it was considered too risky to move to CD-ROMs exclusively before the mid-90's. There were still plenty of customers with no CD drives.

 

[Jarpie]

Couldn't they also have made publishing or distribution contract with some of the publishers without losing the IPs with shared costs?

 

[Infinitron]

Couldn't they also have made publishing or distribution contract with some of the publishers without losing the IPs with shared costs?

Hell if I know. Everything the public knows about this comes from here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_14/87-The-Conquest-of-Origin

 

[Jarpie]

Couldn't they also have made publishing or distribution contract with some of the publishers without losing the IPs with shared costs?

Hell if I know. Everything the public knows about this comes from here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_14/87-The-Conquest-of-Origin

Yeah, I read that too, I was just thinking aloud.

 

[Dexter]

IIRC the reason Origin had to sell out was prohibitively high distribution costs. In particular, the rising number of floppy disks their games required.

garriott can into space but not compact disc

There's a very good article on that over here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_14/87-The-Conquest-of-Origin

Brian Fargo and Tim Cain in his GDC talk both said Fallout cost somewhere around 3 million dollaru: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa5IzHhAdi4&hd=1

Witcher 2 from some financial statement because of potato salaries:

== TW2 production costs:
PC: 7,43 mln USD
XB and PC EE: 2,44 mln USD

Total: 9,88 mln USD [i.e. 33,1 mln PLN (Polish zloty)]
== Sales of the whole franchise (TW1, TW1 Enhanced Edition, TW2, TW2 EE): over 4 millions.

Btw. altogether "Baldur's Gate" products sold about 5 million copies: http://books.google.de/books?id=wxeZaGcqdLUC&pg=PT210&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false with Baldur's Gate selling 2 million copies alone through 2009.

Remember though that in the olden days there wasn't much in the way of Middleware that could be used and they had to build those engines entirely up from ground, with all the tools involved, also there were usually IP costs involved.

Regarding other types of games, since Tim Schafer was being talked about, Grim Fandango was apparently $3 million
Psychonauts was $13 million: http://kotaku.com/5884958/the-past-and-future-of-psychonauts-2
Full Throttle just over $2 million: http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Ti...Video-Game-Budgets-Current-Budgets-39474.html