Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part II Budgets Accidentally Revealed - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 July 2023 / 7,415 Views
The budgets for two first-party PlayStation games have accidentally been revealed in a document submitted by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The budgets were supposed to be redacted, however, the numbers can be read despite this.
The document reveals Horizon Forbidden West had a budget of $212 million and took over five years to develop with over 300 employees. The Last of Us Part II cost around $220 million to develop and had a peak of around 200 full time employees. It was in development from 2014 to 2020.
Horizon Forbidden West released for the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 in February 2022, while The Last of Us Part II released for the PlayStation in June 2020.
"A comparison of the engagement with a AAA game to the engagement with a big budget Hollywood movie is instructive to understand player loyalty to game franchises," reads the document. "While most viewers of a movie will watch it once, players of a successful multiplayer AAA game will play it constantly; while a movie might run two hours, players of a successful multiplayer AAA game may play it for hundreds of hours a year."
The document says Call of Duty is "critical" to PlayStation's competitiveness and the franchise has "tens of millions" of players on PlayStation.
Thanks, IGN.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This explains why they don't want these games on PSPlus day one. That is a heavy investment.
Tbh, idk how these kinds of budgets are sustainable. We know other PS studios like Santa Monica, Insomniac, and Sucker Punch absolutely have this level of budgets, if not more. What happens when they regularly go up to $300 million+? Something has to give at some point.
They break even around 5-6 million units sold at full price, all these games have sold more than that.
Most PS game sales aren't at full price though and it's worth noting that they don't make the full amount on physical sales either (but those are pretty low by now), but even if some struggle to break even the occasional 20 mil+ seller will probably more than make up for it.
It is sustainable by seeling a lot of titles, and reason why they don't go day one on the subs.
Yeah, but that's part of the problem. Sony has little room to afford many misfires. If every single game they make has absurd budgets, then every single game has to have absurd sales. It's great when it works, but detrimental when it doesn't. Not to mention, this doesn't include marketing budgets.
Partly why I wish Sony would invest in more smaller AA games as well for more creative risk taking and not have to worry about a game having to sell 10 million+. Unfortunately, these major budgets are now leading to them investing heavily into GaaS.
The thing is those big budgets tend to be earned according to Sony the first two uncharted games cost $20 million apiece with there success seeing the budget doubled for uncharted 3 , another thing is according to Yoshida when he was head of Sony
WWS he said that part of the profit from those big AAA games is returned to SWWS and earmarked for other smaller games and that on average each AAA game enables funding for on average 7 smaller games he then went on to say that contrary to popular thinking that the money would be better spent elsewhere the vast majority of those games either made a profit or broke even and most important of all gave PlayStation a much more diverse Library of first party game styles and genres.
Purely from a creative level, I'd love to see what happens if you took 1/10th of that budget and gave a smaller corner of that team 2 years to create a compelling AA title, I'd love to see what that produces.
I'm curious how something like Ratchet compares
TLOU3 300plus million budget!
Truly doesn't make sense to release these heavy caliber games on gamepass or ps plus premium
This is the way
I mean I kinda would have expected these figures and they are hardly shocking. These are big budget system seller titles. Although I did laugh at the "...and took 5 years to develop." Like really? Did they look at the release dates of HZD and then HFW or something? :P
the redacted documents had the number of months and year of start development and launch.
I'm not surprised. Big-budget films are $200 million and up. Even when games don't have the celebrities to pay ridiculous amounts of money, there's tons of production costs involved.
I really wonder what NIntendo's budgets are. The only way I could see Tears of the Kingdom costing $150 million or more is because it was in development for about 6 years and has so much gameplay to test and experiment with.
I think even the most expensive Nintendo games budget is about 50M for development.
Idk if it's accurate or not, but I remember reading a lot of stories that Breath of the Wild cost 120M to develop. Obviously Nintendo never shares this kind of information, so no way to tell how accurate that was.
I think the 120 thing is from a comment from Nintendo saying BOTW sold 2 million it would break even so people did the math. Who knows how accurate that translation was. Nintendo is not known to blurt out stuff like that. So it's shaky but at the same time I can believe it but I'd imagine ToTK is cheaper thanks to most the groundwork already laid out.
Thats a big incorrect assumption.
Think games like Zelda which take 6 years to make and paying the highest talent in the industry lead to 50m? 50m is what Indy games cost today.
When you tack on advertisements, it gets pretty expensive. There were quite a few Last of US 2 commercials and ads everywhere online at the time.
Interesting. Unfortunately, there is no sales data to compare this against.
With the few info we have the most we know is that both titles basically paid for themselves on launch weekend. Hope we see more numbers
I doubt that, last of us 2 would have needed almost every copy to have been sold digitally to break even opening weekend. Probably took slightly longer to break even. Although we don't know if this budget includes marketing as well. Considering it took 2 years for it to reach 10 million I can't imagine sony are 100% satisfied with sales on this, especially when compared to the new GoW selling over 10 million in 3 months. It's definitely a profitable game but I doubt it's as profitable as sony was hoping for.
Going by the sales figures we have and the budget here that is simply very unlikely. In 2020 physical sales made up roughly 23% of sales on ps4. That puts roughly 3 million digital and 1 million physical if they get $60 for every digital copy and from what I've read roughly $34 for every physical copy sold that would put the game at roughly 214 million opening weekend. If marketing is included in this bughet its possible it made a profit in its opening weekend but pretty much impossible for that to happen opening day. If marketing is not included in this budget then it is impossible for it to have been profitable opening day.
You're only 6 million off and you think it's very unlikely? That margin of error is tiny.
If we assume those cuts are correct (they're purely estimates though), what about the special editions? 4 versions ranging from: $69.99, $79.99, $169.99 and $229.99? We know the last 2 sold out. I would (conservatively) say that easily covers the extra $6 million, and some.
6 million for the opening weekend and I did concede that its possible it was profitable without the marketing budget for the opening weekend. But day 1 is still pretty much impossible, unless the game sold all of the 4 million on it's opening day. I'm literally just saying it probably took a few more days for it to become profitable which is not a very out there take.
Nonsense to say that these can’t be on PlayStation plus day one. Sony literally makes $750 million a month from PlayStation plus.
1 game that takes 4-5 years to make only costs 200 million. Sony flat out lying that they can’t afford day 1 AAA PS + launch.
