Top 10 Most Expensive Games Ever Made

A Dutch touch in the list: the Amsterdam studio Guerrilla Games received a generous budget from Sony to make the sequel to Zero Dawn. With a price tag of $212 million, revealed in leaked documents, this is one of Sony's most expensive productions ever. The result is impressive, because the robot dinosaurs have never looked so convincing.

No game exceeds the rumors surrounding GTA VI. A frequently cited figure, from a leak after the infamous Rockstar hack, speaks of a total budget of $2 billion. Rockstar and parent company Take-Two have never confirmed that amount, and analysts who dig through Take-Two's accounting are more likely to estimate an amount between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. Even on the conservative side of that estimate, GTA VI is easily the most expensive game ever made, after twelve years of development time since its launch in 2014. Rockstar is doing everything it can to meet the sky-high expectations. If the game sells anything close to what GTA V did, with more than 10 billion dollars in turnover at the time, publisher Take-Two will soon have the last laugh.

Star Citizen is entirely funded by fans through crowdfunding. What started as a Kickstarter project in 2012 has grown into one of the longest-running development processes in gaming history. More than $668 million has now been raised and spent on development, while the game is still officially unfinished. It is considered a technical marvel, but also one of the most expensive experiments in the history of entertainment.

Sony bought the studio and financed the development of this shooter for eight years. Insiders estimate the total cost at around $400 million. The game was released in August 2024 and was taken offline after two weeks because hardly anyone played it. It is now considered one of the biggest and most expensive flops the industry has ever seen.

Thanks to a major data breach at developer Insomniac, we know quite exactly how much this superhero game cost. The counter only stopped at 315 million dollars, more than most Spider-Man films combined. It shows how quickly costs in the gaming industry have risen in recent years. To break even, the game had to sell more than seven million times, which it more than succeeded.

Perfection takes time, and time is money. Naughty Dog took years to make this sequel, with over two hundred full-time employees on the project at its peak. The budget of 220 million dollars mainly went into details such as physics, facial expressions and motion capture. That resulted in a game that won more awards than any other title.

The only older game that holds up on this list. In 2011, $200 million was an astronomical amount, and EA pulled out its pockets in an attempt to dethrone World of Warcraft. The unique thing about this MMO was that every dialogue was recorded by professional voice actors, which alone cost a lot of money. The game never beat World of Warcraft, but it's still going strong.

The game with one of the most disastrous launches ever was also one of the most expensive. CD Projekt Red pumped $174 million into building Night City, not to mention the millions that went into the marketing campaign with Keanu Reeves. After the disastrous start, the studio had to invest tens of millions more to fix bugs and create the Phantom Liberty expansion. In the end it was still a success, but an expensive lesson.

Rockstar is known for its crazy attention to detail, and details cost money. Hundreds of people worked for years on this cowboy epic, from the horse balls that shrink in the cold to beards that continue to grow in real time. Analysts estimate the pure development costs at at least $170 million, although some sources claim that the amount turned out to be even higher due to all the delays.

When Bungie, the makers of Halo, and publisher Activision joined forces, it was worth something. There were rumors of a total budget of $500 million, but that figure also included a massive marketing campaign. The actual construction of the science fiction shooter cost around 140 million dollars. A gamble that paid off, because Destiny laid the foundation for the modern live service genre that players have been stuck with for years today.