Half life 2 production costs

bizmark

Just seen on eurogamer that HL2 will (or has already) cost 40 MILLION dollors to make!!!! it's like 32,423,849 euro at 50 euro a pop they will have to sell 648,477 copys just to make their money back on produceing the game alone :eek:

This game better be good ......selling over 1-2 million copys or something you think they will ?

oh ya and it seems the game wont be ready for a few more months

DiscoStu

can you see it _not_ selling 1/2 a million copies?

Kiith

i can see it being the biggest selling pc game ever, regardless of how good it is. but i'm cofident it will be brilliant.

projectmayhem

it might because of the publicity it's gotten with all the re-writes and re-makes. you know what they say, all publicity is good publicity.

mr_angry

Well, its already the 338th most-ordered item ever on Amazon.co.uk, and its not even near being released yet. I'm willing to bet that the 338th most-ordered item is worth at least 50,000 copies.

[CrimsonGhost]

Originally posted by mr_angry
Well, its already the 338th most-ordered item ever on Amazon.co.uk, and its not even near being released yet. I'm willing to bet that the 338th most-ordered item is worth at least 50,000 copies.

Let me guess. Latest harry potter book was number 1?

Anyway back on topic it's not surprising that a game costs that much to make. You watch the credits for some games and they read like movie credits. All those people working for 2 years on full pay, it'll add up pretty quickly, of course not all of them will be working on it all the time but you get the picture, and that doesn't even include any advertising/marketing, production (as in cd creation, manual and box printing/production).

D.

Matt Simis

Originally posted by bizmark
Just seen on eurogamer that HL2 will (or has already) cost 40 MILLION dollors to make!!!! it's like 32,423,849 euro at 50 euro a pop they will have to sell 648,477 copys just to make their money back on produceing the game alone :eek:

This game better be good ......selling over 1-2 million copys or something you think they will ?

oh ya and it seems the game wont be ready for a few more months

They would have to sell considerably more than that, a chunk of the EUR50 go to the retailer (profit margin, promotional materials, shelf space etc) and the other misc costs (box, cd printing).


Matt

tman

they must've recouporated a big wedge of that via the radeon xp deal already.

what kind of sales figures would your average top selling pc title have? (say... call of duty/vice city.)

Zombrex

Originally posted by tman
they must've recouporated a big wedge of that via the radeon xp deal already.

what kind of sales figures would your average top selling pc title have? (say... call of duty/vice city.)

They wouldn't be average games, they would be very very big sellers, that would make money to balance out the loss made on all the less well selling games.

Like in the movie industry, most games make a loss, and the publishers make money back on the really sucessful games.

Originally posted by bizmark
Just seen on eurogamer that HL2 will (or has already) cost 40 MILLION dollors to make!!!!

Didn't Valve pour most of their profits from Half-Life and Counter Strike back into the development of Half-Life 2 (and they made millions off the long running chart success of Half=Life)

So I think that would have absorbed some of the cost.

Duke Nukem 4 on the other hand has been in development since before Half-Life 1, and they had no great long selling success before hand either. If HL2 cost 40 million I am afraid to ask what DN 4 has cost :eek:

CodeMonkey

Don't forget Valve's business model is now quite similar to ID's in that they are licensing out the graphics engine to other game developers. There's a lot of money to be made from that.

Scruff

Was just going to say what u said there CodeMonkey. I'm sure Havok and hoping the same thing for the physcs egnige they wrote for HL2 or is that part of the whole game engine?

Wonder how much money they'll make back on merchandise? and ye never know it could be made into a film like wing commander! er...:dunno:

mr_angry

Originally posted by Matt Simis
They would have to sell considerably more than that, a chunk of the EUR50 go to the retailer (profit margin, promotional materials, shelf space etc) and the other misc costs (box, cd printing).

But has it cost Valve $40m to make, or has it cost Vivendi $40m to make? If it were a figure attributed to Vivendi, then they would technically be in receipt of the entire €50 price-tag, and hence 1-2 million copies sold would cover things quite nicely, and actual sales may top 10-12 million. I have a game-of-the-year edition of Half Life stating 3 million worldwide sales, and that was a year after its release. Given the greater penetration of computers in the home these days, a larger original fan base, and the already incredible demand, you'd have to say that those figures look reasonable.

They wouldn't be average games, they would be very very big sellers, that would make money to balance out the loss made on all the less well selling games

Yes, but Half Life 2 is looking to be the biggest selling game of all time. I think such comparisons are easily justafiable. In fact, HL2 should outsell the PC versions of CoD and Vice City tenfold, at least.

Don't forget Valve's business model is now quite similar to ID's in that they are licensing out the graphics engine to other game developers. There's a lot of money to be made from that.

Exactly. id began licensing the Quake III engine for $500,000 per game, before knocking it down to a bargain $200,000 per game nearer to the end of its life cycle. Its been used in at least 15-20 major titles, and the demand for the Source engine is sure to compete with it. Having said that, Valve have lost a lot of their advantage since the delay in release. Last September, they would have been streets ahead of their competition, but by the time of Half-Life 2's release, it may be competing with the Crytek, Doom3, and Stalker engines. By comparison, Quake III arena was easily the king in its day. I believe there are several Quake III-based titles still in production today, including Jedi Knight III.

Creamy Goodness

Originally posted by tman
they must've recouporated a big wedge of that via the radeon xp deal already.

what kind of sales figures would your average top selling pc title have? (say... call of duty/vice city.)

valve got 8million for bundling hl2 vouchers with the XT cards

User45701

It will sell several million copes in the first year and as people out there upgrade there PCs in years to come it will have sold the most copes ever.

bizmark

I wonder how much doom 3 has cost .

ANYWAY so Valve has made back nearly 1/4 of the dev costs already ......thats damn good going i can see the game selling maybe 5-10 million copys which they really need in order too make half life 3 or some other big budget game

I hear as well that Valve is going to sell HL2 and counter strike 2 over stream that will cut down production prices and up profits

tman

Originally posted by Wicknight
They wouldn't be average games, they would be very very big sellers, that would make money to balance out the loss made on all the less well selling games.

i said average top selling pc title.

(heh, 8:30am really doesn't suit me)

po0k

Originally posted by Scruff
I'm sure Havok and hoping the same thing for the physcs egnige they wrote for HL2 or is that part of the whole game engine?

Afaik Havok is 3rd party middleware too, I've seen it mentioned in a few other games a while back.
Afaik it isn't Valve's work.

RuggieBear

Afaik Havok is 3rd party middleware too, I've seen it mentioned in a few other games a while back.

Havok is a company set up by some boffins from comp sci in TCD

http://www.havok.com/company/index.php

Agent Orange

Originally posted by project-mayhem
it might because of the publicity it's gotten with all the re-writes and re-makes. you know what they say, all publicity is good publicity.

Unless you're producing a game called Daikatana and your name is John Romero.

Zombrex

Originally posted by pekelly
Havok is a company set up by some boffins from comp sci in TCD

http://www.havok.com/company/index.php

one of the (very) few Irish success stories when it comes to the game industry (no one mention FunCom) ... now if they would only give me a job :rolleyes:

RuggieBear

Originally posted by Wicknight
one of the (very) few Irish success stories when it comes to the game industry (no one mention FunCom) ... now if they would only give me a job :rolleyes:

Apologies for wandering off topic but isn't there a games developer out in Bray in the Maltings (if you know that neck of the wood)?? Saw it last night but cant remember the name....
p

Zombrex

Originally posted by pekelly
Apologies for wandering off topic but isn't there a games developer out in Bray in the Maltings (if you know that neck of the wood)?? Saw it last night but cant remember the name....
p

I know bray but not sure of the company you mean. If you find out will you PM me, cause it would be interesting to know

tHE vAGGABOND

I work for a large PC games developer and I have to tell yas that PC games dont sell as much as y'all think.

A game can top the UK PC games charts on an average week selling only 5,000 odd copies. Now some games sell huge amounts, but in general PC games dont sell as well as PS2 games, for example. Thats something that a lot of people just dont see. Look back over the history of the games charts and show me the PC only games that have done well, and topped the charts for a while...

We have Championship manager 4 and 0304. What else? Sims and its packs did well, but the PS2 releases keeps that on the charts. The fact that sims and cm stay in the PC chart all year round shows you the strength of the PC market.

UT2004 and BF:Vietnam would both be considered big PC games releases (not in HL2's ball park I admit, but games most PC gamers would be looking at), and neither was at the top of the all formats charts this week - placing 6th and 3rd. Lets see how they do moving foward?

Now it will do well in lots of places, at a [a bit educated] guess it will sell something like 2 maybe 2.5 million world wide in its first year on sale. That excludes Steam, and indeed people like me who got a free copy with ATI cards over the last 6 months.

The fact you will need a uber PC and you will need a net connection to play half life will rule a lot of people out in the short term (valve have said you will need a net connection to play the single player game, for some reason Im not clear on).

It will still be number 1 in the sales charts for ages, but dont assume that every joe in the street will spend a grand to get a fancy new PC with a ATI graphics card to play the game.

You forget, one of the reasons Half Life was/is so successfull down the years, besides the mods (it was dead as any 2 year old game before CS came out remember), was the fact that it will run on any old machine (166 with 32 megs of ram if I remember)..

bizmark

well of course purely pc based games arent going to sell as well as ps2 games..........after all a good pc costs over 1 grand ps2 = 200

red vex

what about royalties though

neXus9

Wouldn't the game's graphic engine be degraded in price, since part of it was leaked on to the net (or was that just made up to buy them some more time as some magazines and websites were suspecting)??

Anyway, graphically which do you think is better?? Hl2 or doom 3. It looks like doom 3 has the better shadowing and lighting, but hl2 seems to have tremendous facial detail.

Having said that, I like the painted texture look for the monsters, and gives it a great cinematic look.

I guess doom 3 is better, but I'm thinking that the source engine will be better equipped for out door enviroments.

nesthead

if there are people like me out there, who are going to buy a new pc solely to play this game i dont think they have to much to worry about.