Due to poorly redacted documents submitted as part of the FTC’s ongoing lawsuit against Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, the budgets for two of Sony’s largest games to date have been revealed.
The US regulator is attempting to temporarily halt the trillion-dollar internet titan’s inconceivable $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard, and a series of gaming companies have been drawn into the subsequent upheaval. The budgets of two of PlayStation’s most popular titles, Horizon: Forbidden West and The Last of Us: Part 2, are revealed in a document that has been poorly redacted by the company’s legal team.
The latter, which began development in 2014, just one year after the original game, cost Sony an eye-popping $220 million to create, while Aloy’s second excursion cost around $212 million. In both instances, over 200 individuals were working on the initiatives at their peak.
Do you know that this week’s Nightfall activity in Destiny 2 reintroduces a Battlegrounds assignment on the moon, but players are having difficulty with it, particularly those trying Grandmaster runs of the activity:
It is important to note that none of these figures include significant marketing expenditures; they represent only game development costs. Although it didn’t provide a dollar amount, Sony stated that “global marketing costs for AAA games are large, even for established franchises”.
Tom Warren, senior editor at The Verge, tweeted the news as well –
Sony did great job on the document redactions… not 🙃 https://t.co/aPQgk9JU8L pic.twitter.com/5rJQbZbbd0
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) June 28, 2023
We are not particularly surprised by the production costs, as game development budgets have been on the rise for quite some time. It may, however, highlight the Japanese company’s reluctance to include these titles in its PS Plus subscription on launch day, a position the company has argued is unsustainable.