Some things have recently caught my attention about how expensive Skyrim is to make
1. They have had people working on this game for about 4 and a half years. obviously it was a very small group at first then after fallout it was a large group..After all its expansions all the devlopers were working on Skyrim.
With most AAA games no one spends as much time as bethesda does on games.. Look at COD games They take not near as much time yet they still make more money than SKYRIM.
2. The voice actor list is out of this world and those actors had to have gotten paid a good amount of money.. these actors include Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, Lynda Carter, Joan Alien, Michael Hogan, Vladimir Kulich, George Coe and many many others this info is at this http://gamesas.com/eng/news/pressrelease_2011-0927.html
3. The size of the game world takes intricate detail especially on the PC version as well as the amount of man power it takes to create these massive interactive worlds with radiant AI.. That stuff takes a lot of development time

Anyone have any guesses as to what the Budget is or any other examples of how its expensive or cheaper?

A pretty penny, thats for sure!

Around 100 million.

anyone know how much a developer at bethesda makes?

A few thousand.

Games are not expensive to make, especially one that's been worked on for ~5 years...

the fact that it took five years is why it will cost a [censored] load of money? they have to pay the devlopers tey don't work for free and to have a small group work on Skyrim for three years and then over 100 developers work on skyrim for 2 years you are already above ten million in salaries alone not to mention air time and getting skyrim out there and published as well as all the voice actors.. there is no way it costs a few thousand?

You should get your sarcasm meter checked.

CoD Modern Warfare cost ~50 million dollars, not counting the budget for marketing, producing discs etc. Skyrim will probably cost a bit less, but I guess not that much less. Most expensive game so far was GTA 4, which cost 100 million dollars.



Which again proves sarcasm doesn't work on the internet. Although I understood what he meant.

totally only read the first line...i feel like an idiot

Indeed.

:spotted owl:

Please recalibrate your sarcasm detector. :thumbsup:

Ninja'd: :ninja:

$60m-$70m

totally ninja'd :shakehead:

I'm going to guess between 50-100 million.

EITHER:


42


OR


OVER 9000!


I'm leaning towards 9000², though. :biggrin:

all the moneys

LOL

Skyrim costs enough that any developer without a proven record like Bethesda would never have had a publisher foot the bill.

I'm guessing around $72,000,000

I am curious if any of the devs put in "off the clock" hours though. These kinds of things are passion driven, and I definitely wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a few cases of that.

It's all computer generated. There aren't any real-life sets and there's no overpaid Hollywood stars in it so I doubt it's that expensive. Perhaps around $30 million or even less.

I believe IMDB Pro has estimated at $100,000,000. Take that for what's it worth.

Probably around $20 million.

-Mr. Maric

I agree. Bethesda only make the games that they love to play, so I bet there were many 'late nights' where devs got so engrossed that they hadn't noticed the time! I know that I would do the same.

Here is the estimated budget reported by imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814884/business

I think you're selling the industry short. Considering GTAIV cost 100Mil, I wouldn't put Skyrim anywhere less than half of that.

It's a huge, long-term project, costs add up very quickly.

Well that is possible ... if Bethesda is located in Elbonia.