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AAA game titles (games that represent the current standard for technical excellence) can cost as much as a blockbuster film to make and promote. With a budget of $100 million, Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA4) currently ranks as the most expensive console game ever made. During three and half years of production, more than one thousand people worked on the game. Just obtaining rights for the hundreds of music tracks in GTA4 involved contacting more than two thousand people.¹⁴

Development, licensing, and marketing constitute the major expenditures in game publishing. The largest part of the development budget-the money spent designing, coding, scoring, and testing a game-goes to paying talent, digital artists, and game testers. Each new generation of gaming platforms doubles the number of people involved in designing, programming, and mixing digitized images and sounds.

Independent game makers must also deal with two types of licensing. First, they have to pay royalties to console manufacturers (Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo) for the right to distribute a game using their system. These royalties vary from $3 to $10 per unit sold. The other form of licensing involves intellectual properties-stories, characters, personalities, and music that require licensing agreements. In 2005, for instance, John Madden reportedly signed a $150 million deal with EA Sports that allowed the company to use his name and likeness for the next ten years.¹⁵

The marketing costs of launching an electronic game often equal or exceed the development costs. The successful launch of a game involves online promotions, banner ads, magazine print ads, in-store displays, and the most expensive of all: television advertising. In many ways, the marketing blitz associated with introducing a major new franchise title, including cinematic television trailers, resembles the promotional campaigns surrounding the debut of a blockbuster movie. Just as avid fans line up for the midnight release of a new Batman or Twilight movie, devoted gamers mob participating retail outlets during the countdown to the midnight launch of a hotly anticipated new game.