Cost of Development

[Naviaras]

Has anyone with more financial insight figured out what DIII cost Blizzard/Activison to develop? I know that the game isn't finished, but I don't know what information is given out in Blizzards Quarterly financial reports or their Perspectives.

[Azzure]

Activision Blizzard present their financials itemized in many different ways, but the one most applicable to determining this is the details per business segment. It is separated into Blizzard, Activision, and Publishing.

Unfortunately they don't break down expenditure per game title. I will look over their statements again but I also don't think they itemize development costs per segment, only as a total (so development costs would be pooled together with both activision games and Blizzard games).

In the 2011 statement, the 3 months ending June 2011 to they spent:
213m on product costs (on game development)
116m on product development (technology development)
129m on admin expenses
90m on sales and marketing.
59m on WoW operating expenses

This is for both Activision and Blizzard, fyi.

It's very hard to predict the development costs for D3 because a lot of costs overlap. QA as one example, is paid for as an administration cost, over the whole company so it's impossible to say "They spent $x on QA testing for Diablo 3", because QA does more than just test D3.

In terms of ACTUAL development of the game, my best guess is a median salary of each dev @ 80k, which translates to about 100k after HR costs. So 100k times by the amount of devs assigned full-time on D3, per year. The number of devs probably changes weekly, so again, it's nearly impossible to accurately predict this.

[Naviaras]

Thanks for the info. I think the most interesting thing is the 59m on WoW operating expenses. I bet this figure or something close to it is what they hope to milk out of AH fees.

[Azzure]

Thanks for the info. I think the most interesting thing is the 59m on WoW operating expenses. I bet this figure or something close to it is what they hope to milk out of AH fees.

That's operating expenses (the cost to operate WoW). Their WoW revenue is much higher. $359m per quarter, or 1.436 billion per year.

WoW is massively profitable.

[Concupisco Quaestus]

I read somewhere that the average cost of a "commercial" MMO is in the 100mil range and the few press-releases I've seen from companies that have given a number for their estimated development cost seem to have all fallen in around that area, if not much more, considering D3's troubled past and the amount of time this has been in development I could see D3 easily matching the cost of an MMO.