Halo 4 is the most expensive game that Microsoft has ever produced

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Developing games ain’t cheap. Grand Theft Auto, Street Fighter, Assassin’s Creed needed enough funds to buy me several island getaways on which I could build a fortress to house my collection of Batman and Iron Man armours with I’m drifting again! You know what else those games have in common? They didn’t cost anywhere near as much to produce as Halo 4 did.

Talking to Polygon, Microsoft Studios head Phil Spencer described Halo as a $3 billion franchise, and as the “most important entertainment product in the company”. When pressed for how much it cost to create Halo 4, hey big Spencer remained tight-lipped, saying only that “nothing’s even close.”

To put that into perspective, Halo 3 had a development budget of $60 million, and made over $300 million in first week global sales for Microsoft, back in 2007. If i had to take a stab at the budget for Halo 4 however, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear if around $80 – $100 million had been spent on creating the game.

Of course, cash doesn’t equal quality, and there are plenty of games out there to prove this, such as The Witcher 2, which managed to deliver blockbuster entertainment for around $10 million.

But either way you slice it, that’s still a whole lot of green. Still, even if you aren’t a fan of Halo or a diehard Playstation fanatic, it’s pretty damn hard to deny that the money was well spent on the visuals for Halo 4. I’m just hoping that a chunk of change made its way into the gameplay as well.

Halo 4 is out on November 6, exclusively for the Ex-Bawks free sixties.