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Both The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West cost over $200 million to create, documents submitted as part of Microsoft’s ongoing legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission have revealed.
The document submitted by Sony Interactive Entertainment was clearly meant to redact the number of employees, budgets, and length of time it took to create two of Sony’s biggest marquee titles. Unfortunately, despite the information being marked over with black ink, the numbers and amounts are still visible, offering new details on what it takes to make a AAA, first-party title for PlayStation in recent years.
In the case of 2020’s The Last of Us Part II, the game cost $220 million to develop and, based on the submitted documents, at least five years to develop. Sony saw a peak headcount of more than 200 full-time employees working on the project. Horizon Forbidden West, which released in 2022, took over five years to create as well and cost $212 million to develop, with a peak headcount of over 300 full-time employees working on the sequel.
The document goes on to state that in addition to development costs, global marketing costs for AAA games are also large, even for big-name franchises. Those budgets would make Sony’s first-party titles equally as expensive or even more expensive than than the biggest blockbuster films.
Sony later states in the document that “The competitiveness of PlayStation with Xbox is contingent on the availability of high-quality games that utilize the innovative and computing-resource-intensive features of the console,” and that if “high-quality” games were not available on PlayStation and only available on Xbox, “most consumers will choose Xbox instead.”
According to IGN (who has seen the full version of the document), Sony goes on to state AAA games like Activision’s Call of Duty franchise are “critical” to PlayStation’s competitiveness in the gaming market, and that Call of Duty games are played by tens of millions of players on PlayStation alone.
The peek behind the curtain of what the budgets look like for first-party PlayStation games is just the latest revelation to come out of the ongoing Microsoft and FTC hearing, as the federal regulator looks to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard out of anti-competition concerns. Over the last few days, a number of major players in the industry, ranging from Microsoft CEO of gaming Phil Spencer to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, have taken the witness stand to deliver testimony. Along the way they’ve revealed details such as Microsoft purchased ZeniMax in part to make sure Starfield wouldn’t be a PlayStation-exclusive, and that, at least according to PlayStation president Jim Ryan, publishers “unanimously do not like Game Pass.”
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