According to the document provided by Sony, The Last of Us Part II has had a development cost of 220 million dollars and has involved 200 people over five years, while Horizon Forbidden West has cost 212 million dollars and in its project they have worked 300 people for five years. When the court has realized that in the scanned documents the information that Sony had redacted could be seen without too many problems, it has withdrawn them, but it was too late. Internet always runs faster.
The development cost is only a part of the budget of a AAA game. To the more than 200 million dollars that The Last of Us II and Horizon Forbidden West have cost to develop, we must add the marketing campaign, an initiative in which Sony usually invests a lot of money. Rare is the launch of PlayStation Studios that is not accompanied by great publicity and commercial actions. In this sense, the video game industry is similar to the movie industry, where the biggest movies can have a marketing budget of between 75 and more than 150 million dollars.
Sony’s poorly redacted document also offers data that allows us to measure the importance of the Call of Duty franchise on PlayStation in the United States. For example, in 2021 more than 14 million PlayStation users spent 30% or more of their time on the console playing Call of Duty; more than 6 million users dedicated 70% or more of their time to it; and a million users just played Call of Duty. Likewise, the document reveals that in 2021 the version of Call of Duty for PlayStation generated sales worth 800 million dollars in the United States. This figure only includes the sale of the game itself.
And there are still more. Sony documents have revealed that the marketing deal it has with Activision covers one more Call of Duty game, due out later this year. On the other hand, the Japanese company says that almost half of PlayStation 5 owners in the United States also have a Nintendo Switch, while less than 20% of PlayStation 5 owners also have an Xbox Series X or S.
