Bungie Blows a Hole in Destiny's Out of This World Production Budget

How much has upcoming PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 shooter Destiny cost to make? We’re still no closer to knowing the truth, as Bungie has shot down reports claiming that the company has splashed out $500 million in order to produce the sci-fi loot-a-thon. That would make it the most expensive game ever made, but it sounds like that isn't quite the case.

“For marketing, you’d have to ask Activision people, but for development costs, [it’s] not anything close to $500 million,” clarified the firm’s Pete Parsons. “I think that that speaks a lot more to the long-term investment that we’re making in the future of the product.” The publisher did clarify that the above sum included marketing costs, too, but it still seems outrageous.

“We sat back,” he continued, “long before we even came to our partnership with Activision, thinking about, ‘We wanted to tell a story over ten years.’ We wanted each one of these things to have its own beginning, middle, and an end, but we really wanted to step back, and we can do it. We’ve done it before; we did it with Halo, but we didn’t plan it out.”

The enormous figure floating around the web may in fact be referring to the long-term investment that’s going into the Destiny franchise over the course of a sequence of games. Alas, whether or not the series actually sees out its ten year lifespan will depend on the reception to the first game. Fortunately for Bungie, the title’s recent Alpha was very well received.