How much did the Witcher 3 cost to make ?

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IIRC the initial budget was something along the lines of $40 mln - $25 mln for marketing and $15 mln for development. The cost has likely increased by now with the release date being pushed back a couple of times, though.
 
This is something i'd also like to know, specifically how much it cost for the translation and voice acting.
 
To be quite honest, i dont see a reason why anyone would need much less want to know that kind of information. That would be like asking me how much i make in a year. Nobody has any right to that information.

IF the company were publicly traded on our stock exchange, you best believe we have the right to that info.

IF being the key word. Private company's need not divulge any internal financial statements.
 
IIRC the initial budget was something along the lines of $40 mln - $25 mln for marketing and $15 mln for development. The cost has likely increased by now with the release date being pushed back a couple of times, though.

I know that this is pretty common practice in the industry, but the ratio of the marketing budget to development budget is just completely ridiculous. It was the same for GTA V, if I recall correctly.
 
I know that this is pretty common practice in the industry, but the ratio of the marketing budget to development budget is just completely ridiculous. It was the same for GTA V, if I recall correctly.
It's not something specific to the videogame industry, marketing(for anything) has always been expensive. Exorbitant prices. Meanwhile "development" costs consist of paying employees, licensing costs, deal with distributors etc etc etc but the bulk being paying people for work as I understand it. You will only use what you need, it's not like you can just throw money at the game, you can only pay people you have for the work they can do.
 
IF the company were publicly traded on our stock exchange, you best believe we have the right to that info.

IF being the key word. Private company's need not divulge any internal financial statements.

No, you do not have the right to know this, even though they're a public company. They release financial statements, and, as with most countries in the world, that does not require them to disclose costs (or profits) of individual items. Financial legislation also respects the rights of companies to keep such things confidential.
 
No, you do not have the right to know this, even though they're a public company. They release financial statements, and, as with most countries in the world, that does not require them to disclose costs (or profits) of individual items. Financial legislation also respects the rights of companies to keep such things confidential.

First off, I never once stated that they needed to know the BUDGETED itemization of each area where cost was allocated to. Don't confuse internal budgeting with PUBLIC financial reporting responsibilities, which is exactly what you're doing. A publicly traded company is mandated to disclose ALL of its revenue streams whether they chose to expand the income section on the income statement OR disclose it on an independent statement of revenues OR disclose it as a footnote. Regardless, ALL forms of revenues for PUBLIC company's who are traded on the exchange MUST be disclosed and released per the Form 10-k. They also disclose this information during the quarterly/yearly earnings call. This is also true for the company's expenses. When you establish your IPO and go public, you're no longer protected by privacy which is the way the American system is set up. There's no refutation to this, do your research.

Now, with respect to cost allocation, that is a whole different story. These use a form of managerial accounting and cost management to determine where funds should go. These internal forms are not governed by U.S. GAAP per FASB or the IFRS per the IASB so they do not need to be disclosed.

NONE of this information can be applied to privately held company's and/or subsidiaries.

Source: Myself as an Internal Auditor.
 
You're not likely to get this information, I'm afraid. That level of detail tends to remain confidential.

Why exactly? It doesn't seem to be any sensitive info.

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IF the company were publicly traded on our stock exchange, you best believe we have the right to that info.

IF being the key word. Private company's need not divulge any internal financial statements.

CDPR is a public company. But I'm not sure if they need to provide all details. May be some general level is sufficient by law. Still, I don't think the info above is something that can't be published.
 
Now, with respect to cost allocation, that is a whole different story. These use a form of managerial accounting and cost management to determine where funds should go. These internal forms are not governed by U.S. GAAP per FASB or the IFRS per the IASB so they do not need to be disclosed.

Doesn't this mean you're agreeing with me?
The question was how much they paid for VA, how much they paid for translation work, i.e. the cost breakdown of an individual product supplied by the company.

@Gilrond-i-Virdan - yes, they CAN publish it, but nobody can DEMAND they publish it or claim to have the right to know.
 
Enough to mail me a $5000 Nvidia GEFORCE GTX PC.
I promise I'll save up enough to pay off that $2000 tax at the end of the year, I swear !
All jokes aside, I think Prince William helped fund the making of this game, I mean he is a gamer after all, right?
That would be cool haha :)
 
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I know that this is pretty common practice in the industry, but the ratio of the marketing budget to development budget is just completely ridiculous. It was the same for GTA V, if I recall correctly.

As was already stated, this isn't specific to the games industry, but I'll try to shed some light on it.

Every dollar that is spent on marketing is spent there because it works. The hype train makes no stops because audience, and especially launch audience for a given product, is extremely important.

If a game costs (we'll use the previous numbers in this thread, and all $dollars for consistency) $15 mil to develop and reaches say.. 1,000,000 people ($60,000,000 in sales). That's good. 4 dollars earned back for every dollar spent on development. This is successful.

If a game costs $40 mil and reaches 5,000,000 people ($300,000,000 in sales) that's much, much better. That's 7.5 dollars earned back for every dollar spent in total. This is called 'A hit'.

So marketing helps extend the value of each dollar of development (4 million extra people paying $60/copy means a $240,000,000 difference in sales) That means 9.6 dollars in sales for every single extra dollar that was spent on marketing.

(From a business perspective, the budgets for marketing are calculated from determining your customer acquisition cost (in this example $6.25 per customer), and then determining where the return on investment begins to sharply decline, and match that data to how much money you actually have to work with.)


All numbers are hypothetical, but I hope it illustrates why a large marketing budget is extremely beneficial to a company trying to deliver a product, especially a product with significant time and money development costs associated with it.
 
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