100 Million to develop Starcraft 2
I don’t think many people are surprised by hearing this but Blizzard has dropped 100 million on SC2 and that’s not even counting the advertisements, that was solely for development. It makes you wonder how any company nowadays can compete with another developer that drops 100 million on an RTS game (Real Time Strategy). Starcraft was without a doubt one of the most amazing games I had ever played and it was one of the first RTS games I had ever played, I’ll never forget how Blizzard distributed it then as well, they let people have free shareware type versions of the game where you could actually play multiplayer against your friends who owned the game even when you just had a free version of it. It was genious marketing for its time as that was back in 1997-98 so you can just imagine how long I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a “modern day” Starcraft 2. Playing SC2 for me is like a damn childhood dream coming true, 12 years in the making!
I know that may seem weird but I loved this game, it definately cemented my interest in the genre and without a doubt made me love PC’s forever and brought multiplayer gaming to another level compared to what consoles were doing at that time.
I thought this was kind of amusing from www.Gamestop.com :
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has previously labeled the Starcraft franchise as one of the company’s seven “pillars of opportunity.” Kotick said each pillar has the potential to reap between $500 million and $1 billion of operating profit for the publisher throughout its life. The other pillars are Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, World of Warcraft, Diablo, new Blizzard MMOG, and Bungie’s new intellectual property.
So with the Starcraft series being considered one of the 7 pillars of Blizzard and it having the opportunity of easily making 500 million to 1 billion in profit during its life, what can stop or compete with Blizzard?
Related posts:
This is no joke let me tell you.
Epic costs, epic franchise. Epic failure? Probably not but could happen.
100 million / 70.00 = 1.4 million copies
Full retail the numbers work, but whats the wholesale? Whats marketing cost? Whats the b.net upkeep cost? What are the long term costs?
I think its a winner though.