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)
For every one game this happens to there are thousands of others that flop every year.
Same thing for AAA studios.
Not quite. There aren’t thousands of releases per year that would qualify as AAA. In fact, since they take so much longer to make, there are very few of them in a given year anymore.
And yet, lately it’s the low budget indie games that dominate steam charts with massive successes.
And Counter-Strike, and Marvel Rivals, and PUBG, and Crimson Desert, and Baldur’s Gate 3, and Elden Ring, and (somehow) Delta Force. I don’t think you can say it’s only indie games doing so.
Of corse not only indie games. But there’s huge shift in the market from behemoths like EA, or Ubisoft towards smaller studios and indie devs.