Lesie Benzies, who is Rockstar North president and the producer of Grand Theft Auto IV, took a wild guess and said it took around 100 million dollars to make GTA 4.
We already expect Rockstar North to hit it big with Grand Theft Auto 4 (Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3), but it's not a well known fact how much money it cost developing the behemoth of open-world games across three and a half years. Interesting enough, GTA 4 could very well be the most expensive video game to make in history.
Leslie Benzies, Rockstar North president and producer of Grand Theft Auto 4, reportedly made a wild guess saying it took around US$ 100 million to build the next-gen Liberty City. “It's like making a theatre production, a few movies and an album all to fit into one package," he said.
Some 1,000 people were allegedly involved in Grand Theft Auto 4's production, with 220 settled in Rockstar North's Scotland HQ. It didn't take less than 100,000 photographs of New York just to capture the rain's intensity, a thousand pages of script served as the game's backbone, and countless 12-hour days at work were spent by key members.
If it is true that U$ 100 million were spent, Rockstar could safely nudge Silicon Knights' Too Human and Sega's Shenmue off stage since both are known to have fallen a few million short of a hundred. Whether or not GTA 4 sets records, Rockstar can still live off the US$ 50 million Microsoft paid for exclusive DLC and the piles of money its upcoming surefire hit will generate.
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$100? Wow.
You got your 'indie' games, which are produced by a small group of people for minimal cost. You get your low and mid-range games which are produced for a few million. When you get to your 'big name' games, the franchises. Some of those could actually be produced on smaller budgets. Namely the franchise games that don't change much from year to year. Tweak some settings here and there, update the details, etc, and release it.
However, then you have your 'Blockbuster' and 'AAA' titles. These generally need to built from the ground up (like a whole new game engine, starting from scratch for the most part), or otherwise require a lot of pre production (research and conceptual work), advertisements, etc. Games like GTA IV are like this. They are expected to be massive successes, and generally require similarly massive budgets to do.
Movies are rather similar. Most movies have pre-production more or less taken care of. Many movies are based on books, so you just have to adapt a book to movie format (not as easy as it sounds, at least in the case of good book to movie transitions)....
Course, some games/movies can use a smaller budget and produce a great final product. In some cases it succeeds financially (far beyond what they expected, that is), in some cases it can get critical acclaim, but for some reason, it doesn't sell that well (Ico anybody?)