$500 million Gears of War 绝不能再发生

Hello there!

We’re fresh from London MCM Comic-con, where we had a really successful event. We had a great on-stage chat with Doom creator John Romero, where we talked about (amongst other things) the state of Romero Games following the cancellation of a game it was working on with Microsoft. The company had to lay off the majority of its 110 employees, but has since recovered. It was a fascinating chat and we recorded it. So, stay tuned for that edition.

We also spoke with the Star Wars Galactic Racer team (including a surprise appearance from Biddy Blas himself Richard Summers-Calvert), Silent Hill Townfall director Jon McKellen, and the team behind the new Tomb Raider (including Lara Croft herself Alix Wilton-Reegan). My favourite moment was reuniting former Nintendo veterans on stage to celebrate 20 years of Nintendo Wii. That was a fun one. If comic-con post those videos, I’ll make sure to share them.

Anyway, this week’s Here’s The Dring dives into that huge budget for Gears of War: E-Day.

Let’s dive in!

What goes into a video game budget? The answer is not always clear cut.

For instance, during the development of game, a studio might invest in costly new systems or pipeline tools, which are designed to work across multiple titles (even across multiple studios). And so one game ends up taking the financial hit that others end up benefitting from.

In fact, three years ago, one game producer told me how they’d invested in a fancy mo-cap suite. The company was working on three games at the time, but the cost of that suite was assigned to one particular title, because “it could take it”.

Therefore, you should try to treat stories of a game’s budget with some degree of mild scepticism. Even if it’s true, what did that budget include?

Nevertheless, when I was told that Gears of War: E-Day cost $500 million, I was startled. Gears of War should never cost $500 million. The series is a moderately popular franchise, certainly in the US, but it would need to sell around 10 million units at full-price to justify that kind-of spend. Gears of War simply doesn’t do those numbers. Certainly not in the Game Pass era, when tens of millions of Xbox’s most loyal players don’t pay full price to access their favourite first-party franchises.