![]() ![]() The key thing to understand is that the public doesn’t buy B games. Only today, thanks to Steam sales and the like, games actually sell on average for less than full retail. Which used to be the equivalent of $100, because of inflation. Through it all, games mostly have sold for $60. The result: a game like Assassin’s Creed has a staff of 1500 at seven studios in five countries. ![]() Voice and artwork have absolutely skyrocketed. In terms of raw data generated - literally, the number of bytes the game takes up - we can easily see that dev teams have to generate many orders of magnitude more bytes than they used to. These figures, by the way, are already adjusted for inflation, and don’t include marketing money. The biggest games are costing north of a quarter billion dollars to make. In 1995 it was around $2m to make a top-notch, AAA game. In short, it’s been an exponential curve for a few decades now. It’s here: You can find graphs in there of the rise in costs for games. Games, not so much every year a game that is competitive costs more to make. But restaurants mostly compete on fixed costs - ingredients are largely the same for everyone, and barring something weird, their prices change at the rate of inflation. And yes, restaurants are extremely high risk businesses. There is no question that there are plenty of studios that overspend. So question one: How many studios fail because video games are “too expensive to make” versus having a bad business plan or unrealistic expectations? (Or just a bad game?) But restaurants are a high-risk business too. We could look back at the history of studios that overextended and failed, and notice that it sure seems to be a high-risk business. Is it “too expensive”? Well, that’s a value judgement. I’ll share some figures for that later on, but I think that by and large the public doesn’t really know how much games take to make. Bold text is comments I was asked or replied to.įirst off, to address some of the figures in the video: cost of goods is not the same thing as cost of development. So here it is, basically a fix-up post, and not up to my usual essay standards, being as it is cobbled together from several impromptu comments. So I did, in comments on that blog, and the replies there suggested that I needed to make a blog post of it. In particular, it was prompted by this video:ĭespite the title of that video, games are indeed plenty expensive to make, and more specifically, they’re definitely too expensive to make without the revenue brought in by all this upsell stuff.īut the reasons why are complicated, and worth explaining in more detail. Recently I was over on The Ancient Gaming Noob blog, where a discussion broke out on all the recent discussions about lootboxes, game development costs, game pricing, microtransactions, and all the rest.
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