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)
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.
Earlier these few months, an article popped up educating indie devs on how to attract a publisher and it basically boiled down to “appeal to their money-grubbing soulless husks”, because investors don’t care about games, they care about making profit out of an investment.
But it defended this kind of practice because profiteers care about results. They want a game to be successful, because it makes them money. However, they’ll also cut their losses early if it doesn’t look good.
Developers on the other hand just want to express their creative vision, even if this might bring them to ruin.
And it’s this cooperation between realism and idealistic, when done properly, that brings out the greatness of a game. Or so they said.Unfortunately, a lot of the decision makers involved are idiots who fail to understand the need for balance between the costs of production and unhinged desire for success, artistic or material.
Kingdoms of Amalur failed because the people in charge spent their money like crazy on comfort and knickknacks.
Concord failed because the publisher threw a large sack of money at the devs and then fucked right off without a care in the world, leaving a bunch of headless chickens to run around it with no purpose or direction.
New World failed because it was a project run by scammers looking to scam investors (or so I’ve been told).
Highguard failed because the owner was dumb. And probably still is. Also, Tencent was their silent investor, who pulled out when shit went sideways.
Indeed, the formula for a good game doesn’t guarantee success. Even the best of games will fail if the conditions allow it. Yet, for those who simply do not give damn about what they’re making, their carelessness will make damn sure they guarantee its failure.
Piggybacking on your comments towards new world, Amazon spent 1b developing their own engine for the game before they started the game. MMOs being what they are, not being the best profit generators in the industry, it was doomed to fail with that kind of price tag before even releasing the game.
I can’t speak to the scam stuff, but watching the dumpster fire that was that game was some excellent schadenfreude. Expecting to be able to compete with the MMO heavy weights that have been developing for 20 years and the type of rabid content eating gamers that play them, is just an insanely market deaf thing to do, in my opinion.
As a disclaimer, I didn’t play it, just watched it burn from the outside.
were they trying to get away from lumberyard (coughcryengine) or was lumberyard what they spent a billion on?
either way, fascinating
To be honest I don’t remember the exact details about the situation, just the huge amount that was spent on it. If I remember rightly they scrapped the engine at some point and started over or something along those lines but take that with a grain of salt because it’s been so long since I looked into it at all.
yeah that sounds like lumberyard, their reskinning of the cryengine they bought from crytek.
went to a few presentations on this with our local IGDA chapter, it was huge, slow and bloated.
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.
Third the employees.
Reminder that Skyrim was made with a staff of ~300, that included revamping Gamebryo into Creation.
Devs with ~1000 devs using UE5 - what are the people even doing other than useless meetings?
Most of the personnel growth is probably in asset creation. The more realistic you want assets to look the more man hours you need to put in. Even with modern tools it is just gonna take longer to make those assets. Like instead of making a human model by directly manipulating polygons that makes it immediately game ready they first sculpt it in ZBrush then retopo to a lower polygon count to make it game ready. And then add complex facial rigs for cut scenes, high res textures etc.
It’s why companies like Sony hire these studios in China and India where hundreds of people work just making assets.
Skyrim was made two console generations ago, so I’m afraid you can’t use it as any sort of metric for how games are made today. Starfield’s team was about 100 people larger.
They’re not a consistent size over the life of a project. They also contract out a lot of stuff later on to avoid ramping the team up too much.
Look at Epic games, ~5k staff before the recent layoff. The games they developed over the past 10+ years aren’t even AAA production levels.
Epic isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison with most other studios. They don’t just make games, they develop and support Unreal Engine for both games and film production, they operate EGS, a motion capture studio, ArtStation, Sketchfab, and a dozen other subsidiaries. It’s a huge company.
Expanding the team, by contracting or whatever approach they want, is the big mistake that leads a lot of these projects into hell. It draws time away from the core team, by both managing the contractors, and correcting the hundreds of artistic mistakes the contractors are doing. Most historically classic games I enjoyed came from a relatively small team.
Well yeah 300 million, but is the game any good or is it just made to be doodling with the D‘s of game “Journalists”? Just because you pay a lot of people doesn’t mean it’s good.
Does it count also the Publisher budget (which usually goes to marketing, advertisement, etc.)?
Haven’t read the article yet, but most likely, yes. Usually this data comes from the publisher themselves as they are the one fronting the money.
Edit : yep. Though it doesn’t include marketing, which can be in the 9 figures range too for these games…
Maybe stop locating every damn AAA studio in “most expensive city in the world, USA” too. Or allow us to work from home at least. I’d happily take a big pay cut if that meant I could fuck off to the countryside and buy a house in a few years, while working from home.
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Can’t take risks when you put in that much money
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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.
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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.
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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.
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With a small touch of design-by-committee on top
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.
Meanwhile an indie game from a single dev: 500k players on steam.
That makes sense after some thought on it because of how long games are in production. Like 5-8 years of a main studio of like 300+ people. Like if it’s plain 100k salary per person a year at 300 people, $30 million in payroll a year. Add overhead like insurance, taxes, benefits. AAA games have support studios they contract out to. Think like the credits having 1000+ names in it. Getting to 300 million for a US/Canada AAA game sounds unsurprising considering how many years games cook now
These are US and Canada productions. If you’re wondering why game X cost so much less, it was probably made elsewhere
Stardew Valley was made in the US. Same with Terraria, Axiom Verge, Outer Wilds, Balatro, Risk of Rain, Undertale, The Stanley Parable, Hyper Light Drifter, and a shit ton of other games.
If you’re wondering why game X costs so much less, it was probably made by a indie studio!
Jason is just lying at this point, if he believes otherwise.
This thread is about AAA game budgets, not indie budgets. Even Stardew Valley took 4 years of living off of his partner’s generosity while he earned no income. It paid off, but that’s the exception to the rule.
kinda reminds me of piers anthony advice to writers when they asked what is most needed to become a success. He said a partner who works.
What’s an Overheard, did he means “Overhead”?
Last time I checked it’s neither salaries, nor overhead, nor executive budgets, but it’s the PR efforts that spend the most chunk. This shithead trying to load that over the shoulder of developers and not advertising teams.
This shithead is one of the most prominent videogame industry journalist, so his source is probably way closer to the industry and more accurate in many way.
