Most Expensive Games Ever Made

We all know that Video games are quickly approaching Hollywood movies and other industries in terms of budget size. In the beggining of 90s, video game budgets were around $100,000 (Maximum) — when Doom was released in 1993 it had cost $200,000 and was declared as one of the most expensive games at the time. Today, that barely covers just one month worth of production.

  

1. Grand Theft Auto 4: $100 million  

When it comes to sheer production values, quality,sheer amount of best features, the details, no game till now beats Grand Theft Auto 4. The scope of the production dwarfs any other game: over 1,000 people worked on the game for over 3 and a half years, doing everything from studying New York city with cameras that recorded city traffic for months, to contacting over 2,000 people just to obtain the rights to the hundreds of music tracks that can be listened to in the game. Price to record a master for each track ran at around $10,000 and that excludes the license and royalty fees. There’s enough content in the game to keep the average gamer immersed for at least 100 hours. There should be, game  with a budget of $100 million, GTA 4 is the most expensive video game ever made.

2. Gran Turismo 5: $80 million

Gran Turismo has been in development for over five years now, and features over 1,000 cars, each painstakingly recreated for extreme realism (and perfection). Its official budget as of mid 2008 was $60 million, and two years later when the game hits the stores, it will reach a staggering $80 million, making it the second most expensive game in history.

3. Shenmue, $70 million

It's a game that held the record as most expensive game ever for 10 years. Shenmue’s budget was unheard of at the time of its development — a $70 million budget for a SEGA Dreamcast game. Shenmue offered a vast and explorable area, a complete weather system, and so many fine details and features that games even today don’t have. 

4. Too Human, $60+ million

Too Human faced many issues during its development time, chief of which was the long and expensive struggle between Epic Games and the Unreal Engine 3, where developer Silicon Knights abandoned the engine and started making their own — at a time when the game was almost complete. This added at least another $10 million to the budget, according to some sources.

5. Metal Gear Solid 4, $60 million

The biggest, pretties and most complex Metal Gear Solid game, one with hours and hours of cut scenes, amazing production values and one of the best visuals at its time, Metal Gear Solid 4 took 4 full years to make, at a price tag of $60 million, shared between Kojima Producitons and Sony.

source : http://www.gamerzpedia.com/2011/07/most-expensive-games-ever-made.html
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