The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West cost $200M+ each to make
Individual development costs for PlayStation's The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West were over $200 million.
A new document from Sony revealed during the Microsoft v. FTC trial was not properly redacted, in turn showing how much it costs to create a triple-A PlayStation exclusive. And it's likely that numbers for other studios of this caliber, like Microsoft and EA, are in a similar budget position.
Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II released in 2020 for the PlayStation 4, and cost $220 million. Development reportedly took 70 months (or very nearly six years), having started in 2014, a year after the release of the original Last of Us.
Meanwhile, Guerrilla Games' Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million to make over its five-year development period. Sony's document notes that the game has "close to" 9 million players on PlayStation following its early 2022 release on PS4 and PlayStation 5.
However, it's noted that at least a third of Forbidden West's player count likely stems from its PlayStation Plus debut in February. In May, Sony revealed the title sold 8.4 million copies.
The Last of Us Part II is noted as "still profitable," but a similar verdict was not given to Forbidden West.
The development budget of both games is noteworthy since PlayStation's first-party games are so clearly expensive to make. Several of them even hire big-name actors such as Jeffrey Wright (Last of Us II) and Richard Schiff (God of War Ragnarok).
PlayStation's cinematic prestige has made nearly all of its exclusives a big deal unto themselves, in a way that's different from Nintendo's family-focused series or Microsoft's Netflix-like lineup. And these numbers may help to reveal why PlayStation chose to charge $70 for exclusives
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