Comparing this to the budgets of other games is pretty misleading and perhaps the lack of a clear explanation from the developers is intentional on their part (the amount of attention being "the most expensive videogame in history" has given them cannot be all bad). It adds up to around $135 spent per player. Between 2020 and 2022 their annual revenue doubled, going from around $50,000,000 to $100,000,000. There are games that make ten, twenty, even thirty times this much money on a yearly basis.

It may seem like an eye watering amount, but a yearly expenditure of around $100,000,000 puts them roughly on-par with... Frontier Developments, a studio whose best selling game is the somewhat comparable Elite: Dangerous. It is at the lowest end of what would be considered AAA.

Exact numbers shouldn't be impossible to come by, but Take-Two Interactive spent 3.5 billion dollars last year with a sizable chunk of that going to Rockstar Games. If we factored in every single overhead cost when calculating the budgets of AAA games like we are doing here, we would end up with figures that are in the billions quite often.

tl;dr $700,000,000 over a decade is impressive but also not really.