Are you sure about that?
https://www.barrons.com/news/cyberp...-acclaim-despite-seizure-warnings-01607594103
Apparently, Cyberpunk cost $328M to make and considering that it was in development for like 10 years with one of the largest marketing campaigns ever seen and the biggest hype this side of GTA V's release, I seriously doubt Sony ever made a game as expensive.
Pretty good estimation, Cyberpunk 2077
had a budget of $316M.
But yes, Rockstar or Sony marketing budgets are way higher than the CD Projekt ones. I mean, things like covering important metro stations with game ads, ads in the superbowl and tv, massive internet campaigns with digital ads everywhere, etc. Not PR stuff like releasing screenshots or a new trailer or quote every few months.
You literally have this article telling you HFW cost $110M and it's one of the biggest AAA games on the market. Most AAA games aren't as expensive as this. It's among the very top, only surpassed by bigger games like Spider-Man, GTA, or perhaps Starfield. The likes of Elden Ring don't come close.
$80-100M is likely the ballpark of most AAA games. Only the absolute biggest break this figure and this is without marketing costs which can easily double.
What article?
I asked for the source of the 110M and didn't see it. The OP shows a reddit comment where someone shows the IMDB page (a public wiki that anyone can edit) that mentions the 120M number without providing any source. In the video I saw they mentioned it's the most expensive media project ever made in the Netherlands but I didn't see there.
Many AAA games have budgets of $200M, 300M+ or even more. Known cases are recent CoD games, RDR2, GTAV, Star Wars TOR, Star Citizen to name some of them.
HFW is definitely the longer game but in terms of dev time, what takes longer? creating copy paste content and areas or carefully crafting dungeons and tweaking enemy encounters? I really dont think it matters how long a game is as long as the dev time and number of devs are the same. Thats one thing about game development. There is no robert downey jr. taking $75 million per movie or christopher nolan taking $100 million from backend profits, the cost is more or less how much it costs to run a studio every year and how long it took them to ship the game.
SSM took 4.5 years. GG took 5 years. 4.5 years if you start from when they shipped the DLC. GG always had more devs but it seems SSM has caught up. Id say both budgets are roughly the same with Horizon probably costing more since it took longer with more devs for a longer period during development.
Naughty Dog shipped TLOU2 in just under 3 years. And that was mostly due to the hack and then delayed after going gold due to covid related supply chain issues. They couldve shipped that game in 2.5 years. Another 300-400 person studio over at Sony. We can now assume that it cost half of what Horizon cost. Add an extra 10% if we count the cost of living in LA vs Amsterdam.
It all comes down to number of years + number of devs. These are not 1000 person studios or like Rockstar 3,000 people across 7 studios working on one game for 5 years. THAT is your $270-300 million game. Not your GOW, TLOU or Horizon.
According to their game credits in mobygames.com (still don't have the GoWR credits):
TLOU2 2335 people in the game credits (167 of them under 'thanks')
HFW 3445 people in the game credits (79 of them under 'thanks')
GTAV(360) 3772 people (84 of them under 'thanks')
GTAV (PC, I assume a more recent build with remastered and several years of GTA Online content) 4870 people (96 of them under 'thanks')
All this people doesn't work for free. So in addition to the amount of people, the years of development also affects to the budget. And well, the biggest cost in most of these pharaonic projects it's the marketing budget, which often is as big or even more than the development budget.