The mistake by Court reveals the price of Sony’s first-party games like Last of Us 2

A mistake during the Microsoft/ Activision Blizzard FTC hearing has accidentally revealed the cost of making some of Sony’s biggest titles. 

Thanks to some very poor redacting, anyone following the ongoing court case will be able to make out some key information concerning the development cost for The Last of Us 2 and Horizon Forbidden West. 

While the documents have now been pulled from the FTC hearing’s list, The Verge’s Tom Warren tweeted a screenshot of the papers after they were uploaded. The small snippet revealed that Sony spent $212 million for Horizon Forbidden West over five years with 300 full-time developers. While Sony rolled out the red carpet for The Last of Us 2, spending $220 million over six years with 200 full-time employees.

These numbers mean that Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us 2 take second and third spots in the most expensive video games to develop ever, beating out Cyberpunk 2077 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, while only just losing out to Star Citizen sits at the top with over $400 million. However, these numbers don’t even include the cost of marketing two massive games which must have shot through the roof.

The rate at which the cost of making video games are escalating means that numbers like those we saw over at Sony will become more common. Earlier this year the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority published a 418-page report that revealed how the average budget for making games five years ago was $50-$150 million. Whereas nowadays the cost is more like $200 million, a number that lines up easily with Sony’s apparent Triple-A budget.