Hacker News Reader

Comment by gph | Hacker News Reader

I'd be fascinated to see what they spent 260 million dollars on producing this.

I'm sure their graphics engine is pretty amazing, but it's not like they revolutionized anything that I'm aware of. Where did that money go?

View on HN

Actually, 115M was spent on development.

155M+ was spent on marketing.

link: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-18/grand-theft-...

Sounds about right. 200+ people for 4-5 years, pretty much all highly specialized + all other expenses.

The development costs went mostly to content. (Like most games, GTA5 is not unique in this.) There was also a lot of advertising.

Advertising is not usually included in development costs; the total expense was probably higher.

Well, in this case, it's been published that the 250 million included the advertising, as you can read from several other comments in this thread.

Besides a massive marketing budget (which obviously paid off), I have to imagine it took a small army of modellers and artists to actually make that game world. From what I have seen it blows other 'large world' games out of the water. Much smaller than Just Cause 2's for instance, but in another fucking solar system in terms of detail and limited repetition.

Not only that. Many cars have unique customizations like roof racks, nerf bars, bumpers etc.

Okay, so a LOT went into marketing. But there is a significant development budget too... I was astounded as well, until I played it.

The graphics are, as you say, very good. But what the money has clearly gone into is the production value. Cut scenes, animation, map, all of it is very high quality. That's pretty revolutionary attention to detail - especially over such a large map.

I have the game and the complexity is amazing. It's really like a dozen video games in one. The cars and driving alone could be a $60 title. Add a world-class third-person shooter, the biggest map ever, hundreds of characters, thousands (millions?) of items, and you can see where the cost starts to build up. Then consider that each mini game, while built on the same graphics engine, requires a ton of custom logic and visual work. There's tennis, biking, stock trading, you name it. Then of course you have a sizeable marketing budget ... suddenly $260M seems OK.

As others have mentioned, 50% of it is marketing. I am curious though, have you played it? The reason I ask is if you have, it may be fairly obvious where the money has been spent.

Flip flops: http://i.minus.com/iMwZko1Cpcro4.gif

We all know software is something that doesn't necessary get better the more people you throw at it.

RIght but as jamesaguilar above said, content does. I imagine it's linear, as the increasing marginal communication cost of a large team is probably canceled out by increasing efficiency of toolchain and reuse of sub-components.

See, this comment is exactly what I think is wrong with programmers in general. We all spend much of our time learning all the nooks and crannies of software engineering and then we think we've reached some kind of enlightenment and that we all are unique snowflakes.

Seeing programming, which often is named as 'creative work' described as something that's harder to distribute among many people than crating an entire fucking island from scratch is just downright ridiculous.

Yes, programming is hard. Crating entire fucking worlds from scratch is even harder.

It's not a matter of "hardness" it's a matter of system interconnectedness. 10 programmers working for 10 hours creates far less value than 1 programmer working for 100, because the whole system is interconnected and they need to spend a lot of time making sure their parts line up with the rest. 10 artist working for 10 hours might be worth close to 1 artist working for 100 hours If the work is "make an area with trees, roads, and wildlife"

There are bits on the island that need to connect, like the literal roads. Conceptually the mission content needs to line up with the graphical content. But it's not as interconnected as a chunk of software is, and the marginal returns don't decrease as fast.

Pretty sure you're just making shit up at this point.

Ever read The Mythical Man Month? Very relevant to your statement.

He's right though. As someone with 10+ years game industry experience it's obvious. You can't just add a bunch of programmers and finish your game faster because they don't scale up that way.

But if you have content, content is easy to split up. Instead of each designer doing X items, dungeons, neighborhoods, cars, whatever, they just do a fraction of X. It scales so much better.

I was under the impression that a third of that figure was spent on marketing

Perhaps they needed to do some "applied research" to make the game more realistic? You know, like method acting except for developers?

That includes a massive marketing budget.

    * Programming (all kinds - from model behavior to 
      game logic to AI to net code, backend, etc)
    * 3D Modeling
    * Texturing
    * Art
    * Scripts (as in narrative)
    * Music and sound effects
    * Voice recording by professional actors
    * Motion capture of actors
    * QA
    * Sys admins
    * Product and project managers
    * All kinds of executives got paid a shit ton for making decisions
    * Equipment for all of the above
    * Software licenses
    * Advertising
    * Packaging

$115m to develop the game, $150 million to market it. [1]

[1]http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-18/grand-theft-...

This makes me sad.

It shouldn't. Clearly their strategy works.

It makes me sad as a developer, because it implies that marketing is more important than the development effort. It's where the money is, right?

That's a fallacy. Money is not the only marker of importance.

Here, marketing had a positive ROI, so they put as much money into it as they judged profitable.

But if Grand Theft Auto V was an awful game, then the marketing would have been largely wasted, no matter how much they spent.

Anything good still needs marketing, but marketing won't save a bad product. There's nothing inherently filthy about marketing.

It's very, very hard to get people to hear about the stuff you do, even if it's really good.

I dont agree. Proper marketing can sell you almost anything. Even so-so products. And its not rare to see not so good games make it to top 10 sales. The game quality can vary but to sell a lot you can be sure marketing is the decisive factor.

Do you recall all the marketing for "Duke Nukem Forever?" That was a huge steaming turd that no amount of marketing could fix.

Yes, and we have plenty of examples of successes that came naked, without marketing. Eg Minecraft.

Nice successes indeed, but not $1B in a few days successes ;))

Where did I say that word of mouth could no sell either? I'm making the case for the positive aspects of Marketing.

>>because it implies that marketing is more important than the development effort.

It doesn't imply such a thing.

You can think of marketing as a force multiplier. If the developed product is shit, it doesn't matter how well it's marketed because it will never sehahahahahah I can't even say that with a straight face.

If you look at the entire system, its sad for me to think that companies spend 60% of their budget to fight for attention between each other.

Its not Rockstar's fault or shortcoming, but its a problem in how things are done in general.

In the form of a story: Company A and Company B compose an entire economic system, and each build a product with 100% budget. Company A falls behind in sales to Company B for a variety of reasons, of which luck could be one of them. So to get more awareness and better sales, they take 10% of their budget and put it into marketing the product. Now they get ahead in sales, and are very happy. Company B figures this, and now uses 20% of the budget, to overcome Company A.

They will keep racing on marketing and presence as long as they can build the product and stay afloat.

So production is decreasing in proportion to available resources. In absolute terms, we'd have to answer the question of "is marketing making the pie larger" and if so by how much.

If you believe this article http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ it apparently takes more than it gives.

Not really. This quote explains it well, even though it's talking about pharmaceutical companies:

>Company X spends, let's say, $10 a year on research. (We're lopping off a lot of zeros to make this easier). It has no revenues from selling drugs yet, and is burning through its cash while it tries to get its first on onto the market. It succeeds, and the new drug will bring in $100 dollars a year for the first two or three years, before the competition catches up with some of the incremental me-toos that everyone will switch to for mysterious reasons that apparently have nothing to do with anything working better. But I digress; let's get back to the key point. That $100 a year figure assumes that the company spends $30 a year on marketing (advertising, promotion, patient awareness, brand-building, all that stuff). If the company does not spend all that time and effort, the new drug will only bring in $60 a year, but that's pure profit. (We're going to ignore all the other costs, assuming that they're the same between the two cases).

>So the company can bring in $60 dollars a year by doing no promotion, or it can bring in $70 a year after accounting for the expenses of marketing. The company will, of course, choose the latter. "But," you're saying, "what if all that marketing expense doesn't raise sales from $60 up to $100 a year?" Ah, then you are doing it wrong. The whole point, the raison d'etre of the marketing department is to bring in more money than they are spending. Marketing deals with the profitable side of the business; their job is to maximize those profits. If they spend more than those extra profits, well, it's time to fire them, isn't it?

>R&D, on the other hand, is not the profitable side of the business. Far from it. We are black holes of finance: huge sums of money spiral in beyond our event horizons, emitting piteous cries and futile streams of braking radiation, and are never seen again. The point is, these are totally different parts of the company, doing totally different things. Complaining that the marketing budget is bigger than the R&D budget is like complaining that a car's passenger compartment is bigger than its gas tank, or that a ship's sail is bigger than its rudder.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/08/09/getting_drug...

R&D is just a cost. What brings money in is sales and marketing. You dont just sell a product because its 'out there', you need to spend considerable efforts to make it look valuable to all potential customers. Of course its more important than development, because it brings money in. Thats why even shitty games sell relatively well.

Not more important, just more expensive due to external costs, in particular, advertising.

To me this says systems for quantizing game quality needs to catch up to marketing. There will be more money flowing into top quality developers if the quality of development can be measured as ROI.

It seems like a hard problem to me.

Right because Minecraft's success has been because of that massive marketing campaign by Mojang. It depends. Marketing works sometimes, and sometimes you don't need it.

I think it is marketing is need most of the time, sometimes it isn't. Have a look around you at all the marketing that is going on. Even on this website.

It should it shouldn't. Should make you sad because the quality of work should stand on it's eon, shouldn't because consumers require marketing to be encouraged to spend money. Films have often had large marketing spends for a while, the games industry is catching up.

Why? It pays for itself. That's how movies get sold too - you get the best bang for the buck by spending about equally on production and marketing.

Why? Marketing is needed.

Kind of makes me wonder what rorrr2's list would look like for the marketing side.

level design too :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com