Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us: Part II cost Sony over $200 million

Sony has revealed the costs of two recent PlayStation exclusive titles, in a new document shown as part of the ongoing FTC trial over the Activision Blizzard acquisition by Microsoft.

This information was meant to be redacted, but the attempt to do so was a poor one, and as Tom Warren on Twitter has shown, it is still rather easy to see the secrets behind the document, where we can see the development costs of Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us: Part II.

Horizon Forbidden West's development began in 2017 and had finished in 2022, but by that point it had cost Sony $212 million. The Last of Us: Part II started development in 2014 and finished by 2020, and cost the company an even more eye-watering $220 million approximately.

"Developing and producing AAA games often costs over $100 million, requires hundreds or thousands of developers, and takes years," Sony asserts. Hopefully, this serves as proof to the fans who want to see AAA games created in a 12-month time period that this simply isn't possible, and as Xbox stated a short while ago, games nowadays just take a good chunk of time.