With the scale of storytelling and technology in game development, Triple-A game budgets have soared so high that it’s become common for them to be on the same level as Hollywood blockbuster film budgets. The most notorious examples areCyberpunk 2077’s estimated $313 million budget andRed Dead Redemption 2’s $540 million price tag.
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While games don’t often make it a habit of listing their budgets, you’ll be surprised at some of those you’re able to find for some of your favorites and just how low they turned out to be. For the following budgets in this list, we factor in only the production costs of the game before marketing.
10Horizon Zero Dawn - ~$49 Million
2016’sHorizon Zero Dawnwas made for less than $50 million. Considering it’s an open-world PlayStation exclusive and other similar games likeMarvel’s Spider-Manin 2018 cost $100 million and its sequelForbidden Westalmost matched the budget ofThe Last of Us Part 2with $212 million, this is quite a significant figure. With its graphics, enemy variety, characters, and world design, it’s hard to believe the budget wasn’t higher.
This was a new IP endeavor for PlayStation-owned Guerilla Games, responsible for theKillzoneseries, and the budget was on par with Killzone 2’s in 2009, which was around $45 million. The post-apocalyptic story, world-building, and combat designfighting animal-like machines as Aloy with her bowcreated something original and exciting with a lot less.
9Control - ~$33 Million
Believe it or not,Controldidn’t cost Remedy over $100 million to make, not even $50 million. While it feels like such a high-budget game with all the unique elements, striking visuals, and complex narrative, and level design it has in store, the game only cost a shocking $33 million to develop. It just shows the creativity of Remedy knows no constraints.
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Control is another mind-bending paranormal tale from Remedy that shares a world with Alan Wake,an outstanding horror series in its own right. You play a powered character named Jesse Faden inside the Metroidvania-designed Federal Bureau of Control, discovering the mysteries within the building while going up against entities known as the Hiss that possess FBC employees.
8Detroit: Become Human - ~$33 Million
Another PlayStation exclusive whose budget may come as a surprise is Quantic Dream’sDetroit: Become Human, which also comes with a price tag of €30 million (or about 33 million USD), just slightly above the estimates for the developer’s previous games –Heavy Rain($22 million) andBeyond: Two Souls($27 million).
This game centers around a near-future society where androids co-exist in daily life but are hated and feared by humans. Given its more ambitious sci-fi narrative with many different branching paths and a Hollywood cast featuring names like Clancy Brown, Lance Henriksen, Jesse Williams, and Minka Kelly, you’d expect to see the number go much higher.
7Borderlands 2 - $30-35 Million
Borderlands 2is a perfect example that more budget doesn’t always equal more success, as it was about $110 million less than the overall budget of the disappointment that wasBorderlands 3, the worst-received game by fans in the beloved looter shooter series. On top of that, it easily rivaled some of the other amazing FPS games from 2012.
Borderlands is a series that combines sci-fi worldswith a dash of corporate greedand creates some fun shooting mechanics and brilliant humor around its themes, with the story of the sequel game introducing one of gaming’s most iconic villains – Hyperion CEO Handsome Jack.
6BioShock - $25 Million
Despite only a meager $25 million budget,BioShockwas still able to achieve something entirely different to becomeone of the most important horror games of all time. It represented the height of FPS Triple-A gaming in 2007, and no other title around the same time had quite the setting, storytelling, or mechanics BioShock introduced. As a comparison, the less-acclaimed John Woo shooter Stranglehold cost $30 million to develop.
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BioShock immerses you in the underwater house of horrors known as Rapture following a plane crash, a place infested with dangerous townsfolk called Splicers and giant armored drill-wielding Big Daddies you must fight. In addition to standard weapons, you’ll be using powers from your hand called plasmids, such as electricity and insect swarms, that add extra fun and help in combat.
5Assassin’s Creed 2 - $24 Million
Assassin’s Creed 2 certainly didn’t receive the $68 million budget ofWatch Dogs(yes, also higher than Horizon!) or the higher budget of the currentAssassin’s Creedtitles, yet it remains one of the series' best sequels. It’s the game that shaped the direction of the installments to come, with its combat and stealth mechanics, as well as a more expansive story in the rich historical setting of the Italian Renaissance.
Ezio Auditore da Firenze was such a hit of a protagonist in AC 2 that he returned for two more games to close out his storyline before Ubisoft pivoted to a new assassin in the universe. The intricate architecture and graphics for 2009, set pieces like Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine, and traversing the larger scale map as Ezio with all the parkour action make the low budget hard to fathom.
4Hitman 3 - $22.5 Million
With Triple-A game budgets hitting the hundreds of millions by the time IO’sHitman 3launched in 2021 and it being such a long-running series, you’d expect to see it have similar figures by default. However, the budget was well below $25 million, and the missions had some of the most stunning locations and set pieces Agent 47 has seen yet.
You start by parachuting to a lavish skyscraper structure in Dubai mimicking the Burj Khalifa, then a manor in the English Countryside and the vineyards of Mendoza, Argentina, culminating in a sequence where 47 engages heavily armored enemies on a moving train. The missions and locations all sound like something out of Mission Impossible, but nowhere near the budget.
3Crysis - $22 Million
In addition to BioShock in 2007, Crytek’s new first-person shooter IPCrysishad an even smaller budget of $22 million, and it just goes to show once more that an FPS doesn’t need to have anything higher to be a successful game. Crytek mixed sci-fi and military action-adventure, putting you on an island where you face North Korean enemy combatants alongside an alien invasion.
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The coolest part about it was the Nanosuit your character Nomad wore that allows you to camouflage and be completely invisible as though you’re the Predator while increasing your speed and providing you with some armor. It ended up being made into a trilogy, which has since been remastered.
2Gears Of War - $12 Million
Originally developed by Epic and published by Microsoft, this third-person shooter series has gone on to bethe most influential of all time, and it started with an incredibly small budget of $12 million. 2013’s Gears of War: Judgment had a budget of $60 million, and you could expect that number to only have gone up for the production costs of Gears of War 4 andGears 5, so the 2006 one is quite remarkable.
It introduced new action hero protagonist Marcus Fenix, a COG soldier fighting enemies known as the Locusts with a Lancer Assault Rifle that has a built-in chainsaw for melee. The cover system during combat became the industry norm for games of this genre.
1Grand Theft Auto: Vice City - $5 Million
A GTA game amounting to the cost of an average low-budget horror film sounds impossible, but the series had its humble beginnings before the whopping $265 million budget ofGTA 5. Even more impressive is thatVice Cityshared the same budget asGTA 3but delivered a bigger map size and a cast filled with even more Hollywood greats like Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Tom Sizemore, Gary Busey, and Danny Trejo.
Other games around this era in the early 2000s received budgets double this amount, likeMetal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, so Vice City accomplished a lot in terms of characters, open-world exploration, story missions, and weapon variety. Here you play protagonist Tommy Vercetti, newly released from prison and taking on a life of crime during the 1980s in a town reminiscent of Miami.
