I am amazed at the work that it took to make Skyrim and all the effort that was put into it. I am wondering if anyone has a concrete idea of what it cost to develop? I have heard it cost as much as $100 million but I have not been able to find a real source.

The Rumors are all bloated to make it sound impressive for adding sounds to the re-skinning of ES4:0

A bag of cheetos and some mountain dew.

Looking at my CE Art book it shows a shot of 83 people who worked on the project (if all were on it), the average pay of a game designer is around $43,000, however Bethesda has released several hit titles so attempting to make an educated guess between vet's on the project and newcomers let's say an average of $50,000 a head (for reference some of the game designers from Halo make over $200,000 a year now, but these are higher positions/leads)

So my educated guess would be approximately $4,150,000 million a year. Keep in mind though this figure is assuming each employee working full time with near 100% work load, realistically for the first year thru the second year at least will be spent creating the story and concept art so this cost will be vastly lower till it's time to hand everything over to the 3d designers/animators ect.


Source(If you wish to see each individual job pay) http://www.animationarena.com/video-game-salary.html

Thats also only salary. If you add in other people like all the voice actors, and account for any licensing, as well as advertising, I would say like 5-7 million. 100 million is absurd and it certainly cost nowhere near that. And if you look at physical preorders alone, they got about 3 million, which means they made almost 200 million profit. The game business is a great one to be in. (If your fans dont hate your guys. EA >.>)

This is true I cannot include an educated guess for people outside of the information I'm given, so I do not know about third-party individuals but I can tell you from experience that in the actual company every employee paid on salary or paid on projects completed. The reason being the vast amount of overtime that goes on into this industry (The last 3-6 months before a game release, each team member may be required to put in over 60 hours a week) so no employer would pay someone hourly, unless they were part time.

It cost with advertisemants roughly 60 million.

That seems costly for advertisemants, when Skyrim really hasn't been heavily promoted. Also Skyrim was being sponsored by Microsoft (reasonable assumption) as we had exclusive 360 footage for roughly 95% of the previews/reviews.

Interesting chart for dev. costs, although possibly a couple years old. http://images.wikia.com/vgsales/images/c/c6/Factor_5_dev_costs.jpg

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814884/business

No advertisemants are included with the total price. The total price is roughly $60 million.

Source?

I honestly don't remember. Some news article awhile back.