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)
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.