Cost of making a real game :)?

Question

I'm just wondering how much does it cost to make a game that can be if its fun and liked a lot or is good enough to be massively played. An example is a game like MU Online, warrock?Or games that seem cheaper to me that are browsers games such as Tribe War and Fallen sword. Or pretty famous and probably most expensive games to make such as COD4, Orange box, Halo, and Company of heroes?And I'm thinking of total cost, pay the workers, internet fees, etc. Sorry if this is a werid question, i just have a curious mind. hehe thanks for answering if you do or just read. :)

Answer 1

Several million dollars...

Answer 2

like a kajillion dollars

Answer 3

Blockbuster games like Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 are very similar to blockbuster movies, in that they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, and they also take a long time to make.

Heres the difference:

With a movie, you get actors to act while being filmed by a camera, then you edit and polish the film, then you market the film and show it in theaters (a little more complex than that, but bear with me).

With a video game, you don't usually have actors (some do), but you have to spend thousands of man-hours creating the visual effects, the AI, the code, etc. Then you have to test it all along the way, making sure there are no bugs in any part of the game. The hard part is, a movie is linear, it will be the same every time you watch it.

Games on the other hand, are mostly linear, but there are some with infinite different possibilities.

For example, you enter a room in a game, well you have free control over the character to walk anywhere in the room, in any way. So if they don't catch a glitch from just walking into the room and out the other side, there still may be hundreds of glitches.

So testing is a exhausting process as well.

Then comes the marketing, the advertisement, all the same stuff that movies deal with, but it doesn't end there. You have to support your game. If there are problems, you have to respond to them via tech support.

I think some movies might cost more to make, but videogames could possibly be more expensive, in a general sense.

If you're just talking about flash-based games, or simple 2D or 3D games, the cost is a lot less, but it still takes a lot of quality checking, bug testing, etc.

Answer 4

i also want to know

Answer 5

Wow, there are some really low cost estimates in the comments here…

The cost of a game typically depends on how big it is, and how high-quality it is.  Small internet games that are just remakes of existing games like Bejeweled can be made for less than $10,000 usually.  For a larger PC game, at least $750,000, and on upwards to $50 million or more for block-buster games.  

Console games are typically more expensive to make than PC games, because you have to pay licensing fees to the console owner (Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft), programmers who know how to program for consoles are more expensive than PC programmers, and the art typically has to be higher quality.

MMOs are easily the most expensive, with a small indie MMO like Puzzle Pirates costing $2 million to $4 million to make and market, all the way up to something like World of Warcraft at $80 million plus, not counting the expansions.  Budgets for AAA MMOs will break $100 million in the next few years.

Answer 6

the range can be anywhere from free (some self developed web page games)

to over a million dollars

(the average cost of a console game to develop is 500,000-900,000)

mmpogs are considerably higher, the development is constant, the servers cost money to run, but the income from them is much greater as well....