God of War III: How Much Did It Cost To Develop?

For us, t0asty, and the Europeans, but the worldwide, or rather the “first” official release of the game is on the 16th of March :razz:

Hey again SairenSA :razz: I hope you saw my reply to your last question regarding Portal! :grin:

Hmm, it’s a tough set of questions you ask here, one that I don’t have the knowledge to answer fully. However, I’ll answer what I can :grin: Firstly, they usually get their money from the publishers, who usually have a big budget. Publishers play a key role in development, as they are the guys who give the “green light” for the development team to work on a game. In this case, Sony most likely sponsored cash to the God of War development team, Santa Monica Studios in order for them to develop the games.

When they sell their games they also get money. In this case, God of War 1 and God of War 2 were monumental successes, and sold spectacularly well on the PlayStation 2, going down as two of its best titles ever. Most likely, these two games generated an enormous amount of income, so I’d suspect that they use this money to help fund their projects. The teams for these games are also quite large.

As for why it costs so much to make, that’s because technology is constantly improving, and currently technology has reached astounding levels. Also, the budgets these games have are massive, and it’s a necessity due to the cost of producing them. Think about movies, why they cost so much to make, all of the special effects, tools, equipment needed, wages for staff, filming time – it’s along the same lines for games.

For games it would be things, in addition to some of what’s mentioned above, like the console kits and equipment they require for testing, the musicians they hire for music and sound work, voice actors, story and dialogue writers etc. Also the advertising campaigns they create to market their games, the testers on the team who have to sit for hours playing through the game looking for any bugs and problems and the license costs also play a big role, for trademarks, making their own original content etc. Look at graphical and animation detail today, and imagine how long and how much effort goes into designing all of that, often from the ground up.

However, games’ costs can differ for many other reasons, like if you take Radical’s Prototype, for instance, they went to New York and shot millions of photographs in order to replicate the city in their game, so you can see where the extra costs come in.

As for when they start out, they basically put a team together and assign them roles, such as programmers, project managers, community managers, level designers, testers, artists, game designers and more. They look for these people. Once they have the team together, they create their game concept and see what they can do with it, and basically the gist of it is that they approach publishers and try to get deals struck and funding. :grin:

I hope I’ve answered a fair deal of your question, but really, the answers to your questions are aplenty. I stand to be corrected on some of my facts, but I’m sure you get the gist of it from what I said :razz: