The lights are on
StarCraft II has cost quite a pretty penny to develop. The original StarCraft is one of the most popular PC titles of all time, so its no surprise Activision Blizzard has no problem dropping a few bills on the follow up -- a whopping $100 million to be exact.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the $100 million is just the cost of development for the three-part sequel that will kick off with Wings of Liberty. Marketing costs do not appear to be accounted for in this figure.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has called SC II one of the company's seven pillars of opportunity. Each pillar has suspected earning potential somewhere between the $500 to $1 billion, so a few million in development costs shouldn't hurt...
[Via GameSpot]
It'll be worth it.
way worth it
I love star craft and have played it for ever
cant wait for sc2
Oh man, I cant wait to play this. SO CLOSE!
well they are essentially creating the sequel to arguably gaming's first videogame-sport to reach massive appeal at least in korea, which is pretty impressive. Especially how even in starcraft 1 people are still to this day discovering new strategies really proves how versatile of a game it is.
It'll make that money back on day 1.
So if my math is right and all purchase costs go back to Blizzard, then at $60 a unit Blizzard has to sell at least 1,666,667 units just to break even. I guess they are making a huge gamble that it will be the bee-knees. I am tempted.
That's just too much money for a freakin videogame. 100 million dollars could have been put to alot of better things.
Oh, so you mean Blizzard paid for the entire development cost with less than a month's revenue from world of warcraft? Oh, yeah, WoW isn't a giant evil money-grubbing scheme that takes advantage of players....
I'm good to go; I already got my pre-order in. With StarCraft 2, getting raped by the sneaky koreans on battlenet will be delightful. ^_^
Furs of all,100 mill is for the 3 games not just for the first one,and second it's without marketing prices...So it WILL be above 120mill for the whole thing(with marketing).Second,they will make that money on day 1 and will be in + some 100mill more(this will be above 2 mill units sold in the first 24 hours,look at wotlk.2,8 mill in the first day.)
So,HELL YEAH IT'S WORTH IT!!!
that's a lot of moolah
They'll probably recoup the production costs in South Korea alone. Starcraft is pretty much the national sport there. lol
€100+ million to develop a game that Bobby Kotick thinks will make $1+ billion, that's well worth it for Bobby and the shareholders of Activion.
Next Year Activison will fail to pay Blizzard their share of the $1 billion and a few people will be sacked from Blizzard and it will all end up in a big court case.... remand you of anything..
I really don't care how much money they spent on the "Starcraft II Trilogy." It's not worth it to people who will pay full retail price for 1/3 of a completed game. My real worry is that if Starcraft II sales are successful, then we're all going to open a huge can of worms in terms of how developers and publishers will approach video game development and marketing in the future. We will all pay for it through the nose.
I don't trust AV at all, but at the same time Blizzard is one of the more reputable companies out there. From what I understand each part of SC2 will contain around 30 singleplayer levels plus all the multiplayer.
Wile I don't like paying for each installment it sounds like between the 3 installments I will be getting about the same amount of game play as 4-5 similar games combined.
I wana know what the other six pillars are.