Full post: 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)
Here we go again acting like rich people don’t get paid. It’s not the poor CEO’s fault, we don’t actually give them much money ~just millions in stock options~ . It’s all the fault of the people that do the actual work.
Most of that is landlord salaries*
deleted by creator
Can’t take risks when you put in that much money
deleted by creator
Oh I don’t say that it’s a good reason, it’s just why they do it. Shareholder value must go up. Trying something new risks that numbers go down, can’t do that.
Personally I don’t care for “triple A” games anymore. The last one I bought at full price shortly after release was 2019 for Jedi Knight, and that was a huge exception because the last before that one was 2010 for Mass Effect 2. All my other games in my way to big library are indies or games I bought on sale for less than 20 bucks and only because I’m interested in. I have blocked big publishers like EA or Ubisoft on Steam since a few years because of their attitude, enshittifiaction and mostly because their games are the same over and over again.
Edit: oh and because lot’s of their games don’t run (well) on linux anyway.
deleted by creator
It’s because creative direction in these comapnies sucks. It’s usually a big, bureaucratized souless machine where your connections mean more than your actual skill.
deleted by creator
Couldn’t be me. I only pay full price for games when it’s exceptional games like arc raiders or quality indie games with fair pricing.
deleted by creator
Executives should still be accountable for inefficiencies and bad scoping.
The public is crazy demanding wrt AAA titles tbh, haters make comps when one asset is re-used in a sequel
Some players will complain about everything, the industry is the one amplifying it. For example, Like a Dragon games have been recycling assets since forever, and so did Zelda TOTK and no one cares.
In the end, the players would also benefit if the games were made through iterative improvements instead of making everything from scratch every time.
Oh I cared, Tears of the Kingdom wasn’t very good due to the asset recycling. I would’ve wished for a new overworld, the underworld was boring and unnecessary. The sky islands were too gimmicky.
300 million would kinda make sense, as it would mean an avg of 60k/year for a five year production on a 1000 people team. But how many AAA games are actually that large?
Halve the employees and double the salary, and you’ll be closer. Few people on a team will gross $120k, but benefits are part of that cost too.
And taxes.
