'Horizon: Zero Dawn' Production Budget Was $47 Million—How Does It Stack Up Against The Rest?

Let's Take A Look At How Much It Cost To Make 'Horizon: Zero Dawn'

Believe it not, #HorizonZeroDawn's price tag is actually quite low compared to other AAA titles—its team was relatively small as well. During peak development time, the game was being worked on by around 250 people but the majority of the project was lead by a team of twenty while the remainder of the team continued to work on Killzone.

On the higher end of the spectrum, we've got Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Grand Theft Auto V both clocking in at over $270 million (adjusted for inflation). In general, Rockstar appears to maintain a standard of high budgets–Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire all find home in the higher cost tiers as well. It's pretty clear that most of the open world greats from the last decade have been well over this $50 million threshold.

Things get more interesting when you look at the disparities between the money spent making the game and the money spent marketing it. In the cases of COD:MW2 and GTAV, we see something like a 25:75 and 50:50 ratio respectively. It's differences like this that make budgeting a game pretty complicated.

What's The Standard When It Comes To Production Costs On A Big Game?

That's never a simple question—partially because approaches vary and partially because companies are a bit vague about their budgets. When making public reports, it's common to see all of the costs lumped together. That means development, marketing and all other expenditures will appear in the same amount making it pretty hard to pinpoint the cost of actually making the game.

Games are usually considered pretty expensive once they surpass $50 million on the AAA level. With that in mind, you can see how—considering its scale—Horizon: Zero Dawn's conservative number leaves us feeling a bit dumbfounded.

Though plenty of us out there are feeling a bit burned by the lukewarm legacy of the Killzone series, there's no doubt that what we've seen of Horizon: Zero Dawn has a singing a different tune.

Hopefully, Guerilla's success will translate into some awesome sales numbers that will make additional H:ZD content possible—preferably a system of mods that allows you to turn the robot dinos into pets. Don't worry, I'll let you have that genius idea for free.

Do you think that Guerilla put their money to good use with Horizon: Zero Dawn?

Source: (NRC.nl)