The budget for the shooter Gears of War: E-Day has exceeded $500 million, excluding marketing expenses. This is reported by Kotaku. If the information is correct, the game will become one of the most expensive console exclusives of the current generation.
Initial reports of high development costs emerged in June, after the demonstration of Gears of War: E-Day at the Xbox summer showcase. Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming then stated that the project's budget exceeded $400 million, calling this sum extremely high.
However, Windows Central journalist Jez Corden doubted these estimates. He suggested that the costs might have been lower, and that calculating the real development cost is difficult due to the specifics of The Coalition studio's work. In addition to creating its own games, the team assists other Xbox Game Studios divisions.
Now a Kotaku source claims that the E-Day budget turned out to be even higher — over $500 million, and that's without marketing. For comparison, Sony spent about $315 million on Marvel's Spider-Man 2, $220 million on The Last of Us Part II, and somewhere around $212 million on Horizon Forbidden West.
Such high costs create a serious commercial challenge for Microsoft. To recoup development and promotion, the game will need to sell millions of copies across all available platforms.