Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was five times cheaper than Death Stranding. New leads help estimate amount
The developer of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 provided a clue, based on which the game's budget can be estimated.
Game budgets can be quite astonishing nowadays, as we recently discovered through an infographic created by the Epyllion group. However, this doesn't mean that with a bit less money at disposal, devs cannot create an ambitious, large, and engaging game, which is exactly what Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is.
Potential budget for KCD2
Daniel Vavra, one of the main developers of the game, commented on the title's budget on X, in response to a player's comment drawing attention to the poor facial expressions of the characters. However, he didn't provide the exact amount, but only a hint that may lead us to it.
We have more dialogues than any game ever. Way more than games with budgets 10 times higher than ours. We have almost as many cutscenes as Death Stranding with a budget that is 5 times smaller and crowds of people in many of them. Its as good as it could be.
So far, we haven't learned the official budget of Death Stranding, so we have to rely on calculations based on the data we have. In May 2020, Hideo Kojima stated that the game's production costs had been recovered and it had begun generating profit. However, a month earlier, the title had 3 million players in the PSN ecosystem. Assuming that each of them bought the game for the full amount, we get a result of approximately 180 million dollars. However, it will be safer to assume a range of 160-180 million dollars.
If we assume this was the budget for Death Stranding, we can estimate that developing Kingdom Come 2 cost about 32-36 million dollars.
In the case of the first installment, this amount was supposed to be 36.5 million dollars (Daniel Vavra confirmed that it was less than 40 million dollars). So it would seem that the sequel cost practically the same, which is possible. The sequel uses many mechanics and systems created for the first installment, allowing developers to dedicate a significant portion of the budget to its development.
Taking this into account, the sales result of KCD2 is even more impressive. Yesterday, the devs announced that within less than 24 hours of the release, the game had sold over a million copies.
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