Forspoken reportedly cost $100 million to make

[John Elden Ring]

Forspoken reportedly cost $100 million to make, and players are baffled

"I blew up the budget - with my freaking mind"

www.gamesradar.com

Forspoken reportedly cost more than $100 million to make.

The LinkedIn account(opens in new tab) of the game's lead writer, Allison Rymer, describes Forspoken as "a fantasy AAA video game ($100,000,000+ budget) with release date set for Fall 2022" (the game's release window before its second delay).

The discovery of Rymer's comments comes just a few days after Square Enix said that the game's sales had been "lackluster," and that its financial failings posed a "considerable risk" to its parent company. It's thought that the game's underperformance led closely to the reabsorption of its developer, Luminous Productions, back into Square Enix, and may have contributed to the departure of the publisher's president.

That $100 million figure has been met with shock on Twitter(opens in new tab), with one user(opens in new tab) suggesting that "they must have accidentally added a 0. There's no way that game had a 100 million budget."

Plenty of responses are struggling to see where all that money would have gone, not least because Forspoken's reviews didn't speak to a game of that kind of quality. While we don't often see behind the financial curtain of AAA projects, it's likely hoped that a nine-figure price tag would result in a Metacritic score of more than 64, which is where Forspoken currently dwells.

 

[SLB1904]

Doesn't sound like a lot. If it includes marketing.

 

[adamsapple]

 

[arvfab]

You can just stop talking about a game you find mediocre instead of dragging it for no reason ..

 

[Bryank75]

Worth every penny.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Doesn't sound like a lot. If it includes marketing.

It might not, and this game got a lot of ads on TV. I've seen them regularly on Cartoon Network for example.

I don't know what companies usually want in terms of revenue but I'm assuming at least 2x the production costs so that they can double up what they spent making the game. The earlier figure for the game's dev costs was $75 million, that might've been without marketing added.

So Square-Enix were probably expecting at least $150 in revenue, or ~2.14 million copies sold within the launch period, which I'm guessing would be a couple months, particularly so in this case since their fiscal year ends in a couple of weeks.

If those were their expectations, it's possible to see why they say the game underperformed. Any amounts spent on marketing would increase the revenue expectations on software sales.

 

[Zzero]

Possible that currency differences are leading to the discrepancies? Normally that wouldn't have too big an effect on the difference but the yen has lost a fifth of is value over the game's development cycle. All about when and how Sony chose to budget for it.

I don't doubt her figure though, I said in the last thread that 75 million sounded like it was actually a really good deal for what they got, so 100 million sounds more reasonable to me.