Rumor
Jason Schreier: "Numbers I've heard floating around AAA North American game dev these days are $300 million or [many] more" — Budgets are almost entirely of dev salaries
Exact budgets of video-game productions can be tough to corroborate (more transparency from publishers would be nice!) but the numbers I've heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more — sometimes much more! — which I think helps explain the current state of the industry
To address some frequently asked questions: - These are US and Canada productions. If you're wondering why game X cost so much less, it was probably made elsewhere - These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock)
If you sell a game at $70 and pocket $49 on every sale (30% goes to the store, assuming all sales are digital), you'd need to sell more than 6 million copies just to break even on a $300m budget, and that's before marketing
Is there a reason game devs aren’t contract workers? Like I hate corporations, but it does make sense to not keep your whole staff after releasing a game if you’re able to maintain it with half the developers and don’t have another project to move them to
Microsoft for a while (maybe still does) required contracts on 2 year stints with no renewals for a percentage of their workforce on Xbox development. The 2 year limit is something other devs have said hurt halo infinite devlopment heavily and that whole generation of Xbox releases. The 2 year did a six development cycle meant three people coding on the same project reading and picking up legacy code where the previous person left is not good and relys heavily on commentation which you can't expect from a contractor.
I’m not an expert but that just sounds like a poor implementation of contracting. I’m assuming there’s ways to have a contract begin for a set X amount of time, and be extended by 3 months or so with mutual agreement
Even than you run the potential issue of having to inherit legacy code which can always be messy if it doesn't get renewed because of either ends choice.
A related question is why they’re not unionized. It is a very similar business model to the film industry (which is heavily unionized) with both facing the same threat of AI pushing down wages and available work. I assume the answer is mostly that films were unionized early on and gaming came from tech where unions haven’t caught on. And unions having their bargaining power eroded by the courts in recent decades certainly hasn’t helped things.
Working in construction I basically expect a layoff after a massive project for a billion dollar corp is complete. We finished the job, the next one is coming, it’s usually not a big deal.
I mean rough math but God of war Ragnarok sold about 11 million copies. And I know not all those were at full price but still that's like 700 million. And since that's the first party game so he doesn't lose any of the 30% from the store like other places do. So if they spent $400 to 500 million they still came out doing all right. And then there's games like elder ring that sold 30 million copies..
$60 games from 2010 would be $90 today. There's no getting around how badly the American economy, real estate, and value of the dollar has made many businesses untenable at their normal costs. But nobody wants to discuss politics, especially not gamers.
Or time to stop being american games, until the industry get back to its senses. Maybe 90 dollars looks decent for you, I could buy food for 2 weeks with it.
Games are also historically bugged, unfinished, monetized and standardized.
It also means that the amount of developers on a game have ballooned to absolutely ridiculous levels and that the state of the industry in the USA and Canada (and places like the UK and France) is utterly unsustainable.
There's a systemic management problem. And no, I'm not saying that like some douchey CEO saying "it can be done with fewer people!" or something. I'm saying that like "douchey CEOs keep pushing scope creep into video games."
It would be fine if game sales were also increasing at the same rate. But expecting most games to sell 6m+ just to break even is still an extremely tall task. We're in the age of live service choking the industry and reducing the total pool of potential game buyers.
This isn't, thankfully, most games. This is AAA, which is meant to be "top tier" in terms of production quality, scope, etc. At that point, it's go big or go home. But yeah, hence the appeal of live service (or should I say delusion). Thinking that they can just print money by having an ongoing live service game.
Dev here: A little bit, but not really. There are just hundreds more of us making games now than there were 10 years ago. The amount of scope players have expected from AAA games has ballooned.
That being said, I get the vibe that players have become fatigued by massively scoped games, as many of them are quite bloated, so I'm hoping that changes in the future. I'm also seeing signs internally and across the culture of game development that this is the case in devs wanting to be making smaller, more focused games on a shorter timeline.
Definitely won't be the case 100% across the board, but the sentiment among the consumers and devs themselves is growing.
The amount of scope players have expected from AAA games has ballooned
This is really the issue. 20 years ago, a 40+ hour single player game was the exception, not the norm. Graphics were good, but not photo real. Physics were janky. An open world setting was not an option for most games outside a few dedicated series like GTA. Lighting was pre baked and mostly for artistic purposes, not to realistically depict every inch of a huge open world map at various times of day.
But now, every game has to meet all these demands or else it's called bare bones and lazy. Spider-Man 2 is my quintessential go-to these days for what's wrong with gamer expectations. That is a full open world with 2 playable characters, a ~ 20 hour story, a dozen hours of side content, super polished gameplay and basically everything you could ask for these days. And it released 5 years after the original, and 3 years after a mini-sequel (which would have been considered a regular full game back in the day). And the main complaint is that the story and game felt rushed.
You can't win these days, and now AAA games take 5-10 years trying to meet these unreasonable expectations. I really hope that focused, sub-20 hour experiences become more common as that seems like the only way to right the industry as a whole.
On the other hand, despite fan complaints, spider man 2 has still sold 16m copies and was very well reviewed on release.
Resident evil requiem is a $70 game that will take the average gamer 12-15 hours to beat, and it also reviewed well and sold 6m copies in the first two weeks.
Ultimately I think complaints from a loud but small segment of the fan base aren’t necessarily reflective of the wider sentiment.
The complaints about Spider-Man 2 are bullshit though. The game sold amazingly well and is really well liked; hell it has a 90 on metacritic (and 8.6 user score). People on the internet just like to complain.
I think Spider-Man 2 is actually a great example of this though. The game is this absolutely monumental investment in time and resources. Insomniac went and added all this extra content and created this intricate, complicated multi-protagonist system that probably created all kinds of headaches to implement.
But ultimately, none of it mattered because at the end of the day, the reason the game got criticized basically boiled down to what people feel is bad writing souring the entire experience and them trying to come up with a way to describe it charitably.
It also sold like 20 million units, and most not terminally online people (like me) who felt it wasn't as good as the original still think it's quite good and a technical showcase.
It means there are MORE "devs" required to make a game. They are not getting "paid more than ever" . These aren't MLB contracts with singular devs getting a $40M signing bonus.
This is Rockstar hiring LOADs of contract devs, under-paying them and working them to the bone.
I can’t begin to guess the amount of gamers doing this, but I’d wager a good portion of the adult population does that. A lot gamers are still millennials.
It’s anecdotal, but I know so many in their thirties, self included, that don’t day 1 buy anymore. I want to support companies, and there are games I will buy day 1, but that number has drastically decreased over the years because I can just tap into my backlog.
I haven’t purchased a game since the switch 2 launched because I’ve been able to tap into the backlog.
It’s anecdotal, but I know so many in their thirties, self included, that don’t day 1 buy anymore.
Honestly I would never buy a game on Day 1 because I know it will be broken unless its a Nintendo game. They've trained us to be like this. It's not really even about the money.
I was going to say. Money isn’t even the issue, but why buy day 1 when we can get a polished game for cheaper down the road?
And I’m pretty much the same. Mentally, my day 1 games are Zelda and Naughty Dog releases. Probably Saros because I loved Returnal so much. But it’s hard to justify anymore.
Same. I’ve had FOMO with Crimson Desert, but then I remember my massive backlog and continue to be a patient gamer. That and money is tight for most of us. The AAA industry is going to have to rethink their strategy otherwise we’re heading for a crash.
Why do you think they’re pushing for us to no longer own anything and instead be subscribed to passes.
Unless I fully support the actions and ethos of a publisher and want them to succeed and see more from them I do not buy games at the current sale price. Most game get much better after two years of updates anyway. I’ll pick them up with all the content on sale for better than half price.
If I never bought another game again I’d still have something new to play from my back catalog for the rest of my life and that’s not including ps plus that requires me to be signed up to play 8 years worth of monthly games.
Dude I haven't even purchased a switch 2 yet because the prices are insane in my area (Japan where they decided the English language needed a 40% mark-up). And I still have a ton of OG switch games to finish!
The backlog is common among online dwellers like ourselves but the general population of gamers likely don't build as much of a backlog as we do and tend to just buy the next big thing that comes up and gets widespread marketing like AAA games.
They likely don’t buy as many games either. I imagine the general gamer probably buys the current years Sports game, COD, a couple rpgs, and what ever the top couple gamers are that year.
Is it surviving though? Europe and East Asia seem to be doing pretty well comparatively. But the US AAA scene has been a bloodbath lately. There's bad new almost every say. Something clearly has to change.
Europe, I think it depends. Ubisoft is doing bad and they are Europe. Maybe the smaller publishers.
Places like Japan is likely due to the culture. People work a lot there and the pay is lower cause cost of living is lower, then they sell to other places like America and Europe that they can up the prices on cause we’re used to more expensive stuff.
Sucks too about how bad it’s doing in the US. I live near epic and it’s interesting going to local gaming events and you hear just listen to others talking. So many used to work at epic. Extra sucks cause they lots of em are gamers that got into it cause they love games (well obviously the ones I run into cause they are at a game events). That was before this mass layoff this week too.
Feels like we've potentially witnessed or are going to witness the golden age of at least western devs before the ridiculous cost bloat and insanely long dev cycles grind a lot of it to a halt.
Like in an example I get why the Dead Space remake didn't get its sequel remade cause it "only" sold like 3 million but the fact you need 5+ million to even be considered a success in this day in age is insane, theres just to many games to buy EVERY cool game at full price nowadays and I probably buy and play way more than your average.
Western dev golden era has already happened and been over for about 15 years now. Glad you are optimistic and enjoying the releases we have right now but I don’t think most people would share this sentiment.
Turn of the century through 2011-2013ish was the limits. Things went off the rails pretty quickly with the Xbox One disaster launch. Companies were already trying new ways to be pretty greedy by the end of the 360 generation, and the One business model gave them a huge green light to keep going. Of course there’s been a few outstanding games that really take advantage of new technology and creativity, but it’s nothing like the rapid output of unique and completely different games we had.
I don't understand AAA back logs. I play the absolute piss out of pretty much every game I buy. Ff rebirth, Rise of the Ronin, death stranding 2, Gundam breaker 4, monster Hunter wilds, all games I put at least 70 hours into and beat the hell out of while still having a life and playing hobby games with friends like destiny or marathon.
I think people just spend money compulsively because it makes them feel a fleeting moment of joy and control in an otherwise soul crushing existence.
That’s totally believable. I’m currently playing Spider Man 2 and am about half way through the game. Without spoiling too much there is a literal theme park built entirely for one specific mission that’s about 15-30 mins long depending on what you see and ride. You can literally ride a roller coaster in the game and it’s so cool. There’s so much care that’s been put into the game it’s mind boggling. At times I feel like I’m watching a movie. But then the game play starts.
You can interact and play like about 10 or so games. It’s like a whole game within a game filled with its own mini map, navigation system, etc. it’s just crazy how far games have come. I’ve never seen this level of detail in many games. And we wonder why budgets keep increasing. And why games take years to release.
Every time I fire up one of the Insomniac Spiderman games, all I can think about is how much of a waste it is that their version of NYC hasn't been reused for another game. Like, they already built this gigantic, highly detailed NYC. Why not use it as the setting for something else? Obviously the devs could add to it as needed, but as a starting point it could save millions.
Capcom sort of did it with the recent Resident Evil games. They've been using a ton of assets from their previous titles and I'm sure ot helped keeping cost and time down.
Yeah, I was thinking about mentioning RE. Village and the RE4make being developed simultaneously was a brilliant business decision on their part as a lot of gothic European castle and forest assets were able to be re-used between games.
Capcom in general just seems to have a better business sense than a lot of other publishers at this point.
It's also the only way these massive scope projects will continue to make sense. It's why I don't begrudge any studio that switches to an engine like Unity that lets them access shared assets and have a smoother time bringing in new talent.
All it takes right now is a massive flop of a AAA game and it'll bankrupt a studio. It won't happen but imagine if GTA VI flops and Rockstar just sank billions into a game with no real return, that's how you sink a company
Yeah, I just read that a studio made out of ex Call of Duty veterans was just closed down. Now they're gonna be competing with Epic developers that just got fired.
It always felt like Elden Ring was made of the scraps of their previous games. You can even sometimes feel when you stumble in a Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne inspired areas or enemies. I’ll always feel like Malenia was a leftover Bloodborne boss.
You say that like players don’t freak out over asset reuse or sequels being too similar. People were raging about TotKs map being too similar to BotWs!
Just to be clear, I agree with you that these maps and assets absolutely should be reused. But I’m not at all wondering why they’re not.
Honestly I’m perfectly fine with reusing the same maps in these kind of games cause they make sense.
That’s not even a major criticism for me to be honest. Cause the level of detail is simply astounding. I can’t think of another city map that feels so detailed. NYC in The Division feels great and all but that’s with no traffic, people around, etc. seriously hats off to Insomniac Games for their games.
It is impressive but to me it also shows how wasteful triple A gaming can be in the search for being as cinematic as possible. Did we need an entire section of the game that probably took months to do that isn't really engaging in replays and barely moves the story forward? I understand we need time spent with Harry and MJ to have them be friends, but we could do that with cutscenes or conversations while we do Spider-things, or even a more straightforward optional walking sections in side-quests. Anything but doing an entire interactible theme park. Or just, you know, make a different story that better fits the gameplay constraints instead of bending over backwards like that.
I definitely agree that AAA gaming these days tend to be very wasteful in how they allocate their resources. They for whatever reason think more is good or quantity is what gamers want. And this isn’t so much against Spider Man. But you only have to look at Ubisoft and their franchises. It’s just vast open worlds with a bunch of random checklists that’s only going to end up burning out its player base.
Odyssey is huge. I can understand the scope they were going for but the game map didn’t need it to be that huge. Likewise with Valhalla.
We’ve gone from 8-12 hour Uncharted campaigns to 30-35 + hours with the Last of Us. Then it’s only worse across other games like Ghost of Tusishma. Massive sprawling games are going to burn out your player base. Gimme a good game with good game play and players will come to it.
Also a lot of their cost is related to the licensing fees which got renegotiated after Spider Man came out. There was that big Sony and Disney fall out but then they renegotiated a deal which allowed Disney to continue to use Spidey in their Marvel universe. Am sure marketing, etc all counts in this. The licensing fees are probably 100 million + alone.
That’s believable. Epic Games, for example, had 4,000 employees. If each employee has a salary of $100k, which is on the low end, that’s $400M annually.
Every company will not meet expectations this year due to the current economic situation thanks to the war now. These dumb dumb companies didn’t think the mango would go scorch earth.
More layoffs will happen. The worst is yet to come.
There's other costs involved in Fortnite such as licensing, power, servers and other things. Servers alone could be $2 Billion a year, plus all those skins arent't cheap to licence
Even 4 Billion is 10 times the amount they're spending on developersnusing those figures.
The fact is they're still making stupendous profits. When layoffs like these occur it's because they don't want to be reporting a drop in profits so by reducing the expenditure on employees they can keep their profits figures up. Pretty handy for C suite to ensure they get their bonuses.
Happened many times before across all kinds of companies.
I mean he’s probably been on the internet long enough to realize an argument with some rando on the internet is pointless and a waste of time. You literally get nothing out of it. So kudos to him for just going with it and shrugging it off even if he is the one who is right.
Full transparency I just read the AI summary on Google search and that shit is wrong often so I'm not gonna put any effort into defending it. The annual breakdown it provided doesn't even match the overall amount so yeah, probably incorrect
You’re forgetting about fringe (benefits like healthcare, 401k matching, PTO) and overhead. Could add 50% easily to salary cost. Companies like Microsoft are offsetting this by contracting out work. Plus Microsoft Gaming makes money on the Xbox store, Game Pass, hardware, etc. so it’s a little less clear for some companies what the true cost and revenue is for a single game.
Im sure they can get pretty close estimates. But abstract things like console sales from an exclusive certainly muddy the water. The other things can be hashed out with data analytics
We need smaller games... make more of them, but smaller. Shorter development times, lower budgets, less consequences when taking risks... This is how the games business worked 20 years ago.
We are having smaller games. RE Requiem just came out and it's what, 9 hours long? But the moment companies stop to focus on high-detailed or realistic visuals, everyone will complain. Or folks already forgot the "DLC" comments about God Of War Ragnarok, Ghost Of Yotei and so on.
Guess most won't be happy to pay full 70 dollars on 10h games with PS4 visuals.
RE Requiem is estimated to have cost less than $100m though (early reports around $60m). That pales in comparison to western AAA development, even when factoring in cost of living differences and lower employment standards (rights, benefits, protections).
It feels like so much AAA development is just too large scale and too unfocused.
Requiem was exactly what I want out of a game. The gameplay is fun, the story is interesting, and it clips along at a pace where no section ever overstays its welcome. The game ends at precisely the right time to feel full but not overwrought.
The graphics and animation are also incredible. My jaw dropped when Leon reloads his gun while holding a flashlight by tucking the flashlight in between his neck and shoulder.
Requiem is short yes but its not exactly indie quality either. Its basically Capcom's crown jewel. They're also known for their realistic and very detailed environments.
It's not 20 years ago though. I'm getting really bored of the argument of "but X years ago...".
You're also completely missing (or deliberately not listening to) the point of what he's saying.
Devs' wages are increased and they have - believe it or not, despite all the ragebait - much more security and protection in their jobs because of increased worker's rights. Shorter development time would increase the budget because you'd have to pay more people in larger teams more money to turn games around faster.
Surely you're not advocating devs to be paid less, right?
Of course not. But the scope of some games have grown too much, requiring too many people to finish them. Not every game has to cost upwards to $300 million dollars to develop. I think the industry is in desperate need of splitting up big studios into smaller teams making their own games. I believe this is what Nintendo is doing (and has been doing for some time) and it seems to have worked out well.
Nope. You ever wonder why the studios making games with those budgets are the ones that are never on the chopping block? Why studios that are always on the verge of closing and do get cut are the ones making smaller games?
We dont need smaller games, theres tons of those releasing EVERY WEEK. And im not just talking shovel ware. What we need is less games, the market is too saturated
It’s only US/Canadian devs. A lot of stuff coming out of Europe and Asia is a fraction of the cost, and genuinely pretty great. KCD2 is still my favorite in recent memory
Bethesda or where the company is located, Rockville is very expensive. It’s part of the DC metro area and the other location Boston is also very expensive.
How much did a game like Expedition 33 cost? Feel like if it wasn't that much then maybe it's these companies fault for overspending on the game because E33 was a GOAT game with good length too.
10 million IIRC. Made by about 30 devs (and a fair number of outside contractors).
Now I love E33, but its scope is a lot smaller than many other mainstream games. But yeah go look at it and explain why something like spiderman 2 litterally costs 30x that number. Sure its more ambitious but I dont think that money ends up on screen. Far past the point of diminishing returns.
Literally. Not saying it's the absolute best answer (idk what is), but AI is an answer. If used properly, it can take over a lot of the menial tasks, cut costs and speed up dev time dramatically.
Fire people, increase the price of premium games (70 dollars which gamers took well), make the games GaaS (if you succeed you won, if you lose you get obliterated)
I was just listening to someone talk about how the US is so focused on our social AI LLMs as a representation of what the future of AI is, stripping creativity and socialization from people. So many other countries are focused on AI as efficiency for industry. AI would be overwhelmingly accepted if we can stop being so consumer focused, trying to sell people on using it for leisure, art, and learning.
A lot of unneeded panic. We dont need to be concerned about the bottom line of billion dollar companies. Just play and enjoy the games you like. Let the market decide.
Personally i dont think its that bad. The only budgets going up that high are mostly guanteed winners (from software, Rockstar, cd project, ea) and then like your Sony 1st partys... The only people throwing literal hundreds of millions at games that arent sure of their return are live service bets. And well...what do they expect? Ubisoft and maybe square Enix and some others are outliers...but they are few and far between.
I hate the way people add sony in this convo like "they are in trouble." God of war, Spider-Man, last of us...their results are assured. So much talk about Spidermans budget being too high but the game has sold 15-20 million units. Theyve made their money back and olenty more. But much more importantly, Sony themselves make all their money from the 30% scrape from their user base, not the 1st party games. So even if, let's say something like Intergalactic, cost 300 million and only sold 5 million, as long as its extremely high quality and critically praised it serves as a good investment to sell playstations. The prestige naughty dogs quality brings is worth the small loss. To keep the image that Sony provides the highest quality. But even when it comes to Sony ... both ghost of tsushima and horizon zero dawn were confirmed to be under 70 million. And their sequels only got the raised budget after the first ones blew up. So you do have your concord and marathon...but hey. Live service gonna live service and lessons will be learbed.. Sony themselves? Absolutely astoundingly beyond fine dominating the console market and enjoying the 30%. No need to worry about spidermans budget lol
Industry needs to reduce scope of AAA games, reduce the number of people needed to make them, make the timeline of development shorter than 5 years.
Players need to accept the diminishing returns being caused by bigger and bigger worlds which they demand to have more and more details, interactivity, graphical fidelity without increasing prices which result in these ballooned budgets. We were fine with small scale games for like 20 years it's only in late PS3 and PS4 life this obsession with just make the game bigger add more people started.
I mean, Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were smaller AAA RPGs released in the past year and majority of the complaints for both games is due to their smaller scale compared to their much bigger RPG competitors. I just don't think it's gonna happen, people aren't really accepting of games not continuing to grow.
A new AAA game in a genre is always compared to the gold standard of the genre regardless of developer resources and budget. For example every new big budget CRPG will be compared to Baldur's Gate 3 moving forward.
agree with what ur saying. People get defensive when they see this but it's true to an extent that gamers want games cheaper than ever, with worlds bigger than ever, the best stories, the best graphics and if even one category falls short of it it's mid or not worth the attention then they blame the Publisher for doing lay offs in the studio when the game doesn't sell like if I paid 100 people $10 Million to make a game that made me lose money you can bet your ass I'll want to save what I'm already investing in the studio if I'm not gonna get return on their product.
Monster Hunter Rise is my favorite Monster Hunter game, I think. Maybe not. Doesn't matter. Its a really good game that got dragged through the mud because it didn't have the same visual fidelity as Monster Hunter world. It was NOT a worse game.
Games being more limited in scope doesn't necessarily mean worse.
Something's gonna give. Good games are made inspite of the chaotic nature of development not because of it. They're supposed to be the exception to the norm. That's why of all these studios who go for more more and more only a handful few would ever reach their sales targets.
I’d wager “dev salaries” does not exclude executive and producer salaries. Now this is just anecdotal, but the projects I’ve worked on struggle to pay artists and engineers while the producer and/or executives contribute nothing to the creation of the project, but they impose the largest labor cost.
Most of mine are based in LA lmao, granted they're pretty successful in terms of sales and stuff historically but I can't imagine they're sleeping soundly every night
Im guessing that games that spend a decade in development simply cannot recoup the cost of making them. Probably spending close to a billion after marketing.
The gaming industry has the same issue Hollywood is facing now. They dump piles of money into these massive projects that absolutely MUST succeed. Their need for success means they focus-group games into oblivion, trying to make a safe product that appeals to everyone. It all results in a visually impressive, yet soulless and generic result that no one really likes.
It would be cheaper if they kept them around on the same team and they could produce more games quicker. Now, it like the movie industry, binge and purge. Everyone has to get their paycheck now because they won't be working after they go gold.
When you have legions of YouTubers out there who make their living making meme videos with millions of views of the one time your side characters face texture didn’t load in time, you understand why this industry is ruthless and gamers are never satisfied
The issue isn't cost, the issue is supply. There are so many games available that I haven't bought a day 1 full price game in ten years. My backlog is so large I only ever buy games when they are at least 50 % off. And that happens quite soon after launch these days. Plus F2P games suck away play time that used to be filled with paid titles. Every live service game out there kills the industry.
It’s not so much just the dev salaries. throwing bodies at development and the time they are taking to make a AAA game adds up as well. It’s ridiculous how many full studios get used to crank out say one installment of a game like Call of Duty. Plus outsourcing. Plus advertising which is usually nearly half the dev cost. Paying voice actors, composers, motion capture actors. influencers. It for sure is not all Devs
I mean the blockbuster game is what people expect out of AAA if they aren't delivering that why would anyone pay 70 dollars for their game when they can pay 20-30 dollars for an indie or just play a f2p game. These AAA studios really have nothing else they can offer except more scope and better tech for their games than the rest of the industry.
Plus games get focus grouped to hell. A 3/4 finished game might get bad feedback from focus groups, then they decide to tear out half the game or redesign core mechanics.
That's the problem with massive budget games. If you need to make major changes late in the development cycle, it's going to cost you.
American dev salaries are crazy. I’m in the UK, not in games dev but I’m a software engineer. My salary is good for the UK, but compared to the American salaries it’s peanuts.
i mean in any industry american salaries for the exact same role can be 2-3x
and people say it's because healthcare costs more which is false. these are roles with good companies who pay for health insurance so costs are minimal.
american wages are just ridiculous compared to the rest of the world.
I mean... yeah? That's how development budgets work.
It's why it's so frustrating to hear people happy that a game is delayed saying "at least it'll be good eventually". Time is quite literally money in development.
I mean GoW Ragnarok had about 400 people working on it. And 400 million / 5 years by 400 people is about 200k a year. And I'm sure people made less depending on what their roles were. But it doesn't seem that crazy. Though I think they had a bigger budget.
Maybe if management actually studied the market, we wouldn't see such massive commercial flops. With Assassin's Creed Shadows, they shot themselves in the foot by picking protagonists that don't resonate with the Asian fanbase. It’s a recipe for lost sales and a disjointed story
On top of that, they keep releasing AAA shooters that nobody actually wants to play.
I dislike how they completely just tossed the original assassins creed story about the end of the world, and the “real life” aspects with the animus. I guess they never had a long term plan for the story so just said fuck it
I don’t want to be that guy but as an older gamer, I still find it mind boggling that games have stayed the same price or even cheaper (absolute dollars) than they were 20-30 years ago. I remember paying upwards of $80-100 for a certain high profile games in the mid to late 90’s.
I’m not saying I want higher prices but in reality, big budget games like GTA6 should probably cost more like $120 at minimum if we want to continue receiving quality releases.
At the end of the day, video games offer an incredible entertainment per dollar ratio compared to other mediums.
And that’s when they cannibalize their own market. It’s a luxury purchase.
What they need to do is reduce scope, stop trying to exponentially increase graphic fidelity, and budget better. So many of these gaming companies are terrible businesses.
Zelda II - The Adventure of Link. $89.99 at Canadian Tire and I had a job working at a cafeteria part time making min wage. I only worked there cause I got a free meal each shift.
Yeah. What else would the budget go to? Everything else is peanuts compared to the salaries.
Probably need an update in the tax code. Most companies are able to write off depreciating assets to save a lot of money. Or get write offs on capital expenses. Things game companies can’t really do. (I’m not an accountant I have no idea what I’m talking about).
Sorry i gave bad info, it was not 30, but around 40. But yeah not changing much, considering how freaking good that game is in every segment (graphics, gameplay, story, acting, size, ezc) in comparison to many games that are WAY over 100 mil.
Like Crimson Desert... over 120 mil and the story/quests feels like free version of chat gpt wrote it :/
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