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)
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.