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NEWS

Ghostbusters Budget Was $15-20 Million

Tom Ivan's picture

By Tom Ivan

July 21, 2009

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Developer Terminal Reality’s Ghostbusters: The Videogame cost between $15 million and $20 million to make, according to the Star Telegram.

The report suggests that the multiplatform title has already hit a million sales since launching a month ago. Upon its release in the UK the game debuted at number four on the all formats chart, while it was the eleventh bestselling game in the States during June.

The title was originally licensed to Vivendi, but the company’s merger with Activision led to the publishing deal falling through. It was later picked up by Atari, which published the game in the States, while Sony secured European and PAL publishing rights on PlayStation platforms.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said recently that developing a top tier title for PS3 or Xbox 360 typically costs between $20 million and $30 million. He expects that cost to more than double with the coming of a new generation of hardware.

savagehenry's picture
On July 21st savagehenry said:

That's a lot of bread, Did they blow the budget on the voice actors or what ?

Peter_Pesic's picture
On July 21st Peter_Pesic said:

I'm sure the voice acting definitely had a decent part in that figure, but it probably had more to do with the size of the team. I believe programmers working in game development earn annual salaries in the ballpark of 65k-100k, depending on experience and the position. To put it more into context, 30 programmers getting paid 70k, that would be 2.1 million per year.

Take into account all the other people, artists, level/game designers, producers, QA, etc, with enough skilled people working on a game, the development costs can balloon fairly quickly with just the dev staff salaries to pay for. How broad the term "Budget" is, I'd imagine this figure most definitely includes marketing and PR costs as well.

Alex Walker's picture
On July 21st Alex Walker said:

The other question is how much did the license cost in the first place, and is that included in this budget?