Another 50 Million Reasons to own a 360 [Archive]

Invader Phlegm

07-28-2007, 07:38 AM

Truth be told, for $50 million , that is a lot of game.

I remember seeing in one of the early interviews with Sam Houser at R*. The interview was conducted and printed after the Things Will Be Different trailer was premiered, but months before Take-Two announced how much MS was paying for the GTA4 exclusive content. One of the very last questions in the interview that Houser was asked, was concerning the size and nature of the 360 exclusive content. Houser went on to give the (at the time) rather cryptic answer, and I quote, "It will be substantial." At the time who knew exactly what "substantial" meant. But months later, following Take-Two's announcement of how much was being forked over from MS for the content, it brings the Houser's words into a proper light. Allow me to elaborate.

In today's gaming arena, everything surrounding the costs of games has gone pretty much through the roof. To make a AAA title costs loads and loads of money. To market said title, costs damned near as much, if not more. So we take an example like Capcom's Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. We can use this example, because in a recent financial filing, Capcom has made the financials surrounding Lost Planet a matter of public record. For the record, Capcom spent in the area of $20 million just to make Lost Planet. They spend an additional $20 million just to promote it. Of course the game is a million seller and they easily turned a profit on the product, but the point of the example is that it gets to the meat and potatoes of the subject matter at hand. Exactly how much games does $50 million buys a person?

Once you consider the fact that in the case of most game development, the bulk of development dollars goes to first developing the engine and then getting that engine to run properly on console specific hardware. So using conservative estimates, it is safe to say that for the average game, 50% of the budget goes towards getting the back end technology up and running on the platform (ie. building an engine and then making it run for a particular hardware). But in the case of GTA4, that money was already spent when R* built the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game. So when MS approaches R* with $50 million in hand for extra content, very little to none of that money goes to getting the technology optimized for Xbox 360, as this has already taken place and is budgeted accordingly under the development of the 360 version of the retail game.

Still with me? Good.

So for the sake of argument, let's assume that as R* is building the exclusive content, they require some additional optimization of RAGE (the engine running GTA4) to the Xbox 360 hardware. Whatever optimization remains, is only going to run them may 5% to 10% of the $50 million. So once again, I'll stick on the conservative side of the numbers and assume that of the $50 million, R* will need to utilize 10% ($5 million) of that money for further optimizations to 360 hardware.

What this leaves us with, is $45 million to go exclusively toward game development of the new content. I assume that MS will handle their own marketing of the content once it is made available, so I have not subtracted any marketing dollars from the total.

Both Microsoft and R* did say that there would be two packages, released six months apart. So we divide the $45 million in half, and we wind up with $22.5 million per piece of exclusive content.

Now if you remember the Lost Planet example above? You know the one where $20 million buys you an entire videogame title, built from the ground up for current-gen game consoles? Well, I think you see where I am headed with this. The beauty is, you know that at least $10 million (50%) of the money that Capcom spent on Lost Planet, was spent on getting the engine together and optimized for Xbox 360. This is something already accounted for in the case of the GTA4 extra content. So the full $22.5 million goes towards putting together each chapter of content.

Ladies and gentlemen, for $22.5 million each, that is a helluva lot of game that can be purchased.

But for the doubting thomases in the crowd, I'm going to play devil's advocate in your favor, and assume that from the $50 million grand total, Take-Two is going to keep . . . say, 25% of it as a "finders fee" if you will. After all, in the real world, there has got to be some real incentive to do all that extra work, right? So we subtract 10% for further optimization, an additional 25% to buy off the Take-Two executive staff, which leaves us with 65% ($32.5 million) of the original $50 million for the content. Divide that in half and you are looking at a whopping $16.25 million per chapter of content. When you consider that the single most expensive part to game development, all the back end technology fees (building an engine from scratch, and optimizing it) have already been accounted for prior to arriving at this $16.25 million dollars, that is still a larger budget than the average full retail game this generation is getting after you subtract the back end tech expenditures from the grand total. Remember, we estimated that of the $20 million budget that Capcom spent on Lost Planet, only $10 million of it was spent of making the actual game itself, the other $10 went to just making the engine and getting it running properly. Or here is another perfect example. It is a widely known fact that MS only paid Epic $10 million for Gears of War. Epic does not have to worry too much about the tech back end of Gears, because they have already paid for all that work when the developed the Unreal Engine 3. So MS was literally paying them what it cost to make the game, and I am sure a little profit on top.

So when we look at MS spending more money for each chapter of exclusive content for GTA4, than they spent for all of Gears of War, that really brings Sam Houser's comment of "substantial" into some proper perspective. Many (mostly Sony fans) want to believe that the content is going to be some piddly, inconsequential downloads, like most other games on Live. A few levels here, and extra mode there, that sort of thing. But when you break the numbers down, for the money, what MS has really paid for, are two full-blown expansion paks to the game; something in the size and scope of something like Liberty City Stories, or Vice City Stories.

Now that we have cleared all that up, on with the real speculation - with potentially that much content coming down the pipe, exactly what can we expect? Houser said "substantial", and here is what I am guessing at to fit the term and the money spent. I see two possibilities. And while they both may sound far fetched, they both also make a certain amount of sense considering the amount of money being spent to acquire them:
Anyone ever wonder what happened to Staten Island? Liberty City in GTA4 is a mock up of the real life, New York City. Just like NYC, Liberty City even has five boroughs: Dukes (Queens), Algonquin (Manhattan), Bohan (the Bronx) and Broker (Brooklyn). But Alderney, Liberty City's fifth borough, does not correspond with any of NYC's boroughs, but instead represents the city of New Jersey. So what on Earth happened to NYC's true fifth borough, Staten Island (the huge land mass the represents the purple section in the map below)? Anytime R* has been asked questions about the disappearance of Staten Island, they have always blown off the question with noncommittal and indirect answers. In interviews full of direct and to the point answers, a noncommittal or indirect one sticks out like a soar thumb. And it is my hypothesis that Staten Island will make it into the game, but only if you own the Xbox 360 version of GTA4, as Staten Island along with tons of missions to go along with it, is likely to be included in one of the two pieces of exclusive content for the 360. Looking at the map (the purple area), it certainly would account for a "substantial" piece of content.

STATEN ISLAND IS THE PURPLE SECTION
http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/8638/5boroughsya0.png

Remember that billboard at the start of the Things Will Be Different trailer? You know, the billboard that said, "VISIT VICE CITY $300"? What are the chances, that if you own an Xbox 360, the billboard may have spoken the truth? It would not even have to be the entire Vice City either, just a sizable section of the city. And why wouldn't this be a possibility. R* did say, prior to the trailer being released, that there would be subtle hints about the game found in each of the trailers. The guy who first spotted the Vice City billboard, above the rails of the subway train, may have struck gold indeed, and not even realized it yet. A chunk of Vice City is certainly a "substantial" piece of content. And considering the money being spent, would certainly fit the bill of requiring $16.25 million to create.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR BILLBOARD CLOSEUP)
http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/4778/vicecity300aio0.jpg (http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/3816/vcsp4.gif)
Delivering goods of that magnitude is not going to be cheap on the consumer, but it's not going to be too expensive either. I suspect somewhere to the tune of $25 to $30 is what you can expect to pay for all that content. Maybe too rich for some peoples blood, but I think at the end of the day, when you consider the fact you are ultimately getting enough new GTA content to almost constitute a whole new game each, paying $25 to $30 for it, is actually a bargain; and if you are a died-in-the-wool GTA fan (as am I and at least 12 million other people on the planet), the moment you find out this content exists, it falls immediately into the realm of must have.

Am I nuts? Am I out of my mind? Maybe. But I have always found in life, that it pays off far more often to dream and to think and to do, big. It's like the old adage, "Go big or go home." Maybe I am dead wrong, but honestly, for $50,000,000, what else on Earth could it be? It's gotta be big. And whatever it is, for $50 million, you can bet it's gonna be awesome.