Development cost:
Baldurs gate 3 - 100 million USD
Cyberpunk 2077 - 436 million USD
Starfield - 200 million USD
Elden Ring - 200 million USD
Genshin Impact - Hundreds of millions USD
Spiderman 2 - 300 million USD
GTA VI - Expected budget costs to be more than 2 billion USD
Triple A games are only getting more expensive with time, and they are still turning a profit over time.
Expect a most expensive game ever made every 2-3 years with how things are going.
A decade ago people were writing articles about how video game budgets are ballooning, since then video game budgets have continued to balloon ever since with no real slowdown.
Additional fun fact:
Everything cutting edge in tech development currently costs 10s of billions to hundreds of billions to advance further. Only the richest countries and the top multinational corporations are in a position to make those kinds of moves to keep pushing humanity's capabilities further up. If your country GDP is less than a trillion USD, then you are pretty much cut off from participating in the future and developing it further.
Only 19 nation states can afford to assist in building the future, along with 7 corporations.
At current rates the world won't be able to afford to make revolutionary games in another decade or two. Imagine 500 million USD being the norm by 2030, and a billion being the norm by 2040.
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Genshin prob shouldnt count, because its never ending
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I haven't played it. neverending in what sense
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Ongoing development in story, game world, events, characters, ya know, content. Its content is worth a bunch of games at this point
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oh thats nice. is it bigger than World of Warcraft yet?
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No, warcraft has a good 15 years on it
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How many hours would it take to play through the entirety of warcraft?
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Define entirety?
All zones (quests) and dungeons/raids? I'd say you could finish that in a month or two playing 12-16h a day. Double it for both factions.
Maxxing out reputations, mounts, achievements and other useless collectibles? Never.
I was thinking of making a post about a giga German neurodivergent who is actually trying to collect everything in the game.
He's up there but still not nearly finished: https://www.dataforazeroth.com/characters/EU/Blackmoore/Tel%C3%A1r
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Do it
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ping me again I might do it
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what?
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Brother
it's 20 years that released in '04
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And genshin released like 5 years ago. Do the math?
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I wasn't arguing for or against that just saying it's been around much longer than even 15 years
But I guess
genshin 
has an Asian 
userbase that WOW doesn't right?
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Ok look, the other guy was talking about content. Genshin has been making content for 5 years. WoW has been making content for 20. So when i say it has 15 years on Genshin, we are applying the years of content produced against each other. 20 - 5 is 15.
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I searched online and it says 120 hours to level up fully
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