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
They’re focusing entirely on appeasing the most expensive to satisfy people, at the expense of actual good gameplay.
It feels like so much of the games industry is a weird circle jerk. Big game companies feel this weird pressure to make giant games that have 3TB of textures because they’re building everything to be cut into a trailer that looks as flashy as a big blockbuster film, requiring hardware no one can afford. Meanwhile, they add 13 layers of organizational overhead, so no one can do anything on their own because the writing team have to have a meeting with the texture art team and the modelling team and the voice acting and SFX team just so they can even ask the question of ‘How much time will it take to add this NPC in this area and will it justify that much extra artist time/pay by selling another X units?’ much less actually make a good estimate as to the answer. Then you have players, a bunch of whom somehow still get suckered in by those trailers but then spend the next year complaining how much the AAA game sucks but unable to play anything else because of network effect lock in, only to do it all again the next time they see another flashy trailer. Nobody learns the lesson. Everything just repeats until it breaks down as is replaced with the next generation of misery.
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.