Top ten most expensive games ever made.

Have you played Shenmue 1? The first one has hours of dialogue from the most peripherial of characters. You can talk to anyone and they will say something relevant that changes as the story progresses. Toy Story 1 has, per definition, at most 81 minutes of voice acting. Quite a bit less then Shenmue.

 

Have you actually ever looked at accounting statements? Accounting statements tell you nothing about the budget of a game, the balance sheet just lists assets and liabilities (btw, assets=liabilities + equity). That tells you nothing about the budget of a game. Similarly the P\L statement only shows the entire operations income and costs.

You cannot back out what a game's budget it from accounting statements, unless you know that single game is the only thing the entire company producer. Then you can look at the P\L statement for all the years it was in development and just use the costs.

 

If a developer has multiple projects, it may be literally impossible to come up with a definitive price tag on a title but someone would know a very close but ballpark figure. It would be very poor accounting on the part of the company not to have some ideal.

 

Much more? are you serious? Much more of what?

- geometry?
- textures?
- animation?

maybe voice acting, but then those voice actors were nobodies. Toy story had Tom Hanks as the lead and the rest were also hollywood stars.

 

Shenmue changed development platforms which costs money.

Its also a much longer game with tons of content. You can easily waste 100 hours and not see everything the game has to offer.

While geometry , textures and animation may be higher in toy story , they didn't have to work very hard to get every ounce of performance out of a system by tweaking all of the above constantly. Or spend money on fixing bugs.

They animated and textured the movie and sent it to render farms where each frame could have hours or days to process.

Remember shenmue hand an engine and most likely all its tools writen just for the game. Toy story liscensed renderman for it and pixar continued using it for many movies.

 

Not sure what that has to do with anything. Hasn't it been said many times in this forum that asset creation is the most expensive component of making a video game? If that's the case the numbers simply don't make any sense because toy story was made for 33m and has tons more unique and detailed artwork than shenmue. I mean seriously if u break down the numbers it makes no sense. $40m to develop the engine? $20m just for artwork? really?

 

Ah yes, yes, you are right. Didn't think about the fact that one company might have numerous titles being developed at the same time!

I have looked at accounting statements, but to be honest i just don't know much about how games studios work, compared to other companies.

 

What do you mean with this? PRman has always been an in-house Pixar product they use to render their movies. As a side effect they sell it to other companies but it's a critical part of their pipeline.

 

I'm scratching my head too. RenderMan is a PIXAR invention.

 

Firstly, more people appear to have worked on Shenmue than Toy Story, people cost money. Secondly, you are just guessing regarding the relative amount of assets created for each. Well, I'll throw out a guess too based on my observations: thanks to the superior amount of geometry and far better shading, Toy Story was able to get away with using rather a lot of relatively untextured objects. Shenmue didn't have the luxury of being able to do that, everything had to be textured.

 

I've read $44M for God of War 3, the visuals certainly look like it. I believe Sony Santa Monica has some of the best artists in the industry, since even GOW2 looks stunning because of the art.

 

Genuine question: why do i get the feeling that most people on here believe that the better a game looks, the bigger the budget?
Is it really always the case that if a game looks good, it necessarily cost more to make than a game that doesn't look as good?
Does graphics always take up the biggest share of a game budget?

I always believed that this was not the case...

 

It's man-hours that cost so much.

Shenmue threw masses of man-years at making (and remaking) not just content but cutting edge technology to support the game. Not just a fancy renderer - reworking and expanding motion capture studios, creating audio tools that hadn't existed before, researching and modelling real world locations, writing bios for every NPC in the game, having online leaderboards at a time when no-one else's console could even go online - it was nuts.

It would be far cheaper to make Shenmue now because technology and middleware have advanced so much. It would be similarly expensive and risky to try and push so many boundaries so far at once though - which is probably why it so rarely happens.

 

Game artwork is a massive amount of time and money. Most productions have at least 50% of their staff working in this field, or even more. Expectations are pretty high.

 

I don't think anyone doubts you. What is doubtful is shenmue's $70m budget considering CGI movies like toy story ($33m) and a bug's life ($45m) were made for far less than that. There's all kinds of stuff going on in movies that aren't done in games. More unique textures. Lots of unique high frequency geometry. HUGE amounts of animation.

 

I'd actually not take those Pixar budgets seriously. I've once read a book about them and I sure don't recall Toy Story only costing $33M, it sounds way too low.

 

I fully agree with you.
Nowadays it is far more easy to develop due to advances on technology.
Shenmue pushed the boundaries at that time.

 

Not sure why you don't believe those numbers. Hollywood isn't typically shy about how much things cost. Maybe the book you read combined the production and advertising budget. The production only is actually actually only $30m according to this website.

 

It doesn't seem so, as you indicated that the balance sheet would imply something towards the gaming budget. The balance sheet tells you nothing of the sort.

 

Isn't this argument a bit pointless really? It was confirmed that the costs attributed to creating Shenmue added up to around $70 million by Yu Suzuki, and that figure was in the gamers edition of the Guinness book of records as well. If the guy in charge of creating the game says that it cost that much, then it probably did. As for the Toy Story figure, I've yet to find out where that comes from and what it includes. It seems to be based on insinuation rather that a hard figure. I'd also guess that the movie costs do not include things like the cost of setting up the studio and only include money spent specifically on the movies themselves. Finally, it is also worth pointing out that Shenmue had roughly double the amount of people working on it than Toy Story. Pixar was pretty lean really.