This might be a dumb question. So I get that there goes a lot of work and time in creating a high quality game and with major game studios like ubisoft and fromsoft the cost can rank up to hundreds of millions of dollars, but even though it takes a lot of work to make a good game, how does it cost 500 million dollars? like where does that money go to? is there one specific part of making a game that costs a lot of money for large studios?
In: Technology
I actually work in the industry and have insight on how much games cost.
Commenting from a throwaway because it’d be possible to work out who I work for from my previous posts.
The short answer is, they don’t cost that much. The $400M stat that’s been trotted out for Concord has no clearly corroborated source, and has been debunked by far more reputable journalists than the one who initially reported it. For reference, GTA V cost a little under $150M to make, not including ongoing support for GTA Online over the years.
In terms of budget leading up to launch, $400M would make Concord the most expensive game ever made, by a significant margin (discounting the funds allocated towards Star Citizen). People have readily believed this bilgewater reporting because the state of games discourse is extremely poor at the moment, and Concord has become the latest game that people want to hate.
The projects that even begin to approach the amount you’re talking about are the absolute peak of budget. The majority of releases (talking “indie” through to “AA+”) cost anywhere from $500K-50M, with some notable outliers. People forget how small a portion of the games that release in the year are true AAA titles – it’s miniscule in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps the most ridiculous claim I’ve seen is that marketing budgets often are as great as or exceed dev costs. The only situation in which this could approach true would be for a longterm live service title, and we’d be talking dev costs leading up to 1.0 vs ongoing evergreen marketing over a number of years, which is not a fair comparison – especially as any live service title will have ongoing dev throughout its lifetime.
The reality is that marketing budget – with some outliers – typically sits within 5-20% of project costs. Greenlighting marketing spend far beyond that, unless you literally *know* it’s going to be made back due to existing IP strength and hype, would be tremendously irresponsible.
The number of confidently wrong armchair pundits I see on this site talking about the industry, when they have not the slightest idea about how or why decisions are made, boggles my mind. None of you have any idea what you’re talking about.
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