Johnnypenso, maybe you shouldn't read this because I'm going to allegedly be not wrong.
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/gran-turismo-5-sporting-60-million-budget/1100-6239328/
Speaking to the magazine, Polyphony Digital head Kazunori Yamauchi said the budget for the game is around
$60 million. That makes it among the most expensive games ever made--but not the most expensive, according to Yamauchi.
You seem to have missed the headline.
Polyphony Digital head Kazunori Yamauchi reveals next year's sprawling racing simulator cost nearly three times as much as Killzone 2.
It wasn't even out yet. Now, from
GT Planet's own archives,
Gran Turismo 5 is the first full GT game to be released on the Sony PlayStation 3 console. It was released worldwide on November 24, 2010 after more than 5 years of development and a cost of more than $80 million, making it the second-most expensive game of all time as of 2010.
Then again, maybe I just thought they said $80 million...
From the video below:
70 full time employees, 80 contractors at peak production + partners all around the world that help build this game, 400 at our peak, vendors in China, Vietnam, India etc.
So that's 70 full time, 80 they bring in as needed at peak production not all through the project which could easily be for a few weeks or months, and the rest are from outsourcing around the world which could refer to anything like the entire staff of GlassEgg for example. In addition to that, Forza 4 was only 2 years after Forza 3, whereas GT5 was 5 years after GT4.
Regardless, it's clearly not 400 full-time staff for the duration of the game, they bring people in or use outsourcing as needed, which probably keeps the overall development costs as low as possible. Given the 60% shorter development time I'd hazard to guess the budget for Forza 4 was much, much lower than GT5.
Boy, are you optimistic when it doesn't come to Gran Turismo. For one thing as I posted above, contracting only saves you money when you invest in a company that's doing something you aren't, like producing metal casings when you're an electronics assembly plant. Otherwise, it's saving you time. And let's see what's being produced in Forza 4. About 200 new cars and at least six new track locations, plus the rebuilt Nurburgring which could be considered the equivalent of two to four locations itself. Let's say everyone used shortcuts to produce all that, which can't be too much because the cars all feature extensive damage modeling. Polyphony requires about six months per car and up to two years per track - who knows about the Nurb, but let's say five man months per car and a year per track for "Team 10." That's more than 80 man years of work, perhaps as much as
a man century depending on how much they remade. Yeah, they probably worked a few weeks on that.
As for the budget, I seem to recall that a certain car make wasn't available in F4 at launch, and when it was, it was the most expensive DLC they offered. Maybe the F4 budget wasn't all that small.
As for the sounds issue people keep mentioning, Forza is its own beast, and their sounds aren't right, so I have no clue how many unique recordings they used. In person, my real life Mk III Supra sounds like a small school bus until you start getting in the 3000 rpms and above and kick in that turbo, and I've been around a few Supras and they all sound alike. The one in Forza sounds like it's got a Borla on it, at least, all the cars do, and the only car which has these "high quality" distorted sounds is the one the camera is on. Just watch any replay featuring unmodified street cars, and yours will be roaring over a field of, dare I say it, vacuum cleaners.
Every other game has one tenth the cars that GT6 has in it, or less, and I'm not sure how many unique engines race cars use. How many unique cars in Formula 1 for instance? PD does need to step up with better car sound in all aspects for GT7, but this is one area I'd be fine with some shortcutting, unless Griffith's speculation on physical modeling oriented sound creation is realized. Otherwise you're still going to have Premium sounds and Standard sounds as in GT6. And boy, will you guys be happy about that...