Grand Theft Auto IV Producer: Game took around US$ 100 Million to make

Tyranitar24 | April 27, 2008 | News | Playstation 3 XBOX 360 Company

Lesie Benzies, who is Rockstar North president and the producer of Grand Theft Auto IV, took a wild guess and said it took around 100 million dollars to make GTA 4.

We already expect Rockstar North to hit it big with Grand Theft Auto 4 (Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3), but it's not a well known fact how much money it cost developing the behemoth of open-world games across three and a half years. Interesting enough, GTA 4 could very well be the most expensive video game to make in history.

Leslie Benzies, Rockstar North president and producer of Grand Theft Auto 4, reportedly made a wild guess saying it took around US$ 100 million to build the next-gen Liberty City. “It's like making a theatre production, a few movies and an album all to fit into one package," he said.

Some 1,000 people were allegedly involved in Grand Theft Auto 4's production, with 220 settled in Rockstar North's Scotland HQ. It didn't take less than 100,000 photographs of New York just to capture the rain's intensity, a thousand pages of script served as the game's backbone, and countless 12-hour days at work were spent by key members.

If it is true that U$ 100 million were spent, Rockstar could safely nudge Silicon Knights' Too Human and Sega's Shenmue off stage since both are known to have fallen a few million short of a hundred. Whether or not GTA 4 sets records, Rockstar can still live off the US$ 50 million Microsoft paid for exclusive DLC and the piles of money its upcoming surefire hit will generate.

News Story attached to:

Grand Theft Auto IV [PC, XBOX360, PS3]

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Images about this story:

73	Grand Theft Auto IV tops 10 million (5) September 4, 2008
45	Grand Theft Auto IV PC Reveal Trailer (2) October 8, 2008
81	Enhanced textures for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV showed off (5) August 22, 2008
292	Grand Theft Auto: Lego Edition (10) August 4, 2008
100	Grand Theft Auto Heads for DS (11) July 15, 2008

Comments

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Final Blade | April 28, 2008

_{Jesus i knew it was alot but i didn't think it was that much. Wow i hope GTA sales are through the roof come release day. Then it can re-coup its money from this game.}
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  TheBradman1andOnly | April 28, 2008
  
  Estimated sales figures are at $400 million, so it's looking good for Rockstar
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anatomyofme | April 28, 2008

jeezes did they make the next Matrix movie or a video game?? 10 more hours 2 till gta4!!!
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joshuam | April 28, 2008

dayum thats alot of money for a game .they have a few celebs in so i wonder how much there gonna get paid
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kik36 | April 28, 2008

WOW, I could use a cool million right about now!!! I'm not "too greedy" LMAO
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Twisted | April 28, 2008

Holy crap, that's a lot of money to make a game. Let's just hope they get all the money back through sales.

$100? Wow.
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tallteen86 | April 28, 2008

Not surprised. Games these days, are much like movies. Production and budget wise.

You got your 'indie' games, which are produced by a small group of people for minimal cost. You get your low and mid-range games which are produced for a few million. When you get to your 'big name' games, the franchises. Some of those could actually be produced on smaller budgets. Namely the franchise games that don't change much from year to year. Tweak some settings here and there, update the details, etc, and release it.

However, then you have your 'Blockbuster' and 'AAA' titles. These generally need to built from the ground up (like a whole new game engine, starting from scratch for the most part), or otherwise require a lot of pre production (research and conceptual work), advertisements, etc. Games like GTA IV are like this. They are expected to be massive successes, and generally require similarly massive budgets to do.

Movies are rather similar. Most movies have pre-production more or less taken care of. Many movies are based on books, so you just have to adapt a book to movie format (not as easy as it sounds, at least in the case of good book to movie transitions)....

Course, some games/movies can use a smaller budget and produce a great final product. In some cases it succeeds financially (far beyond what they expected, that is), in some cases it can get critical acclaim, but for some reason, it doesn't sell that well (Ico anybody?)
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xsynergyx | April 29, 2008

Assuming all the money that they're going to rake in by the game selling, they'll be making a hefty profit anyways, no matter how big $100 million sounds.