Sony’s confidential data reveals The Last of Us 2 development costs up to $220 million

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently conducted an antitrust review of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, requiring game companies such as Sony to provide relevant confidential data. Because Sony used a marker to blacken some of the data, but it can still be seen after scanning, so the data was stripped by the media and netizens.

These data include the development budget, sales revenue, number of employees, etc. of some well-known games on the Sony PlayStation platform. For example:

 The development budget of "Horizon: The Extremis of the West" is 212 million U.S. dollars, which takes five years and requires 300 employees.

 The development budget of "The Last of Us 2" is 220 million U.S. dollars, requiring 200 full-time employees.

 In the United States alone, the "Call of Duty" series will bring in $800 million in revenue for Sony's PlayStation platform in 2021, and may reach $1.5 billion globally.

 "Call of Duty" players spend an average of $15.9 billion a year on other things they buy

It is worth mentioning that the shooting cost of HBO’s “The Last of Us” live-action drama is about 100-150 million US dollars, which is not as good as the development budget of “The Last of Us 2”.

Elsewhere in the document, Sony’s PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan said that 1 million PlayStation users only play the “Call of Duty” series, and as many as 20 million spend a lot or most of their money on the PlayStation platform. Time to play this series.

The purpose of Sony providing these data to the FTC is to prove that if Microsoft makes the “Call of Duty” series into an exclusive game, it will cause serious damage to Sony (despite previous emails showing otherwise).

In addition, Microsoft also accidentally revealed some internal information during the review process. Earlier this week, the media exposed Microsoft’s internal emails, showing that Microsoft had considered acquiring game companies such as Sega, Bungie, and IO Interactive. According to Matt Booty, head of Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios, Microsoft’s goal at the time was to “spend money to kill Sony.” In response, Microsoft said the emails were just “an industry trend we never pursued” and had nothing to do with the Activision Blizzard acquisition.