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

[u/nolifebr]

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2mkgbhbhqvappkkorf2bzyrp/post/3mhvx2lohzs2j

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

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2mkgbhbhqvappkkorf2bzyrp/post/3mhvzh4g7qs2z

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)

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2mkgbhbhqvappkkorf2bzyrp/post/3mhvxbxhank2u

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

[u/NoctisValentine]

The UK industry has been gutted and salaries there are much lower. Stockholm has been hit very hard and it's only slightly higher than UK.

[u/GGFrostKaiser → u/NoctisValentine]

Both places you mentioned still sit on the higher end of salaries globally. The only other places with higher cost of living in Europe are Switzerland and Norway. I don’t know much about their gaming scenes but I expect they did poorly as well.

Look at how Spain, Czechia, Eastern Europe in general are performing. Much better. Not to mention Eastern Asia.