I believe BG3 will end up being one of the costliest ever RPGs, maybe even the most costly. As I've said many times previously, they'll need a *minimum* of 10 million in sales just to be considered having done okay, and a whole lot more beyond that to be judged truly successful. Several gaming journos are now beginning to write that indeed BG3 should be properly compared with games like Elden Ring, CP2077, and Zelda (which is again something I've long argued), and that means sales numbers WELL beyond 10 million.
How did you figure that? Swen said multiple times during interviews, that EA sales alone allowed them to finance BG3. So, even 10 million copies will be a great success. They are already profiting on the sales.
This simply means they could continue to pay their bills with the revenue coming in from EA sales. It does not by any measure give us any sense of the true total costs of making the game, which by the way was in production for three years before EA, for a total of six years of development time.
Articles I've read say typical recent AAA video games costs a minimum of 200 million, and more likely 500-650 million, to make. And on top of that, they spend up to another 500 million on marketing. And so a true blockbuster AAA game can potentially cost as much as a billion.
