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
As other people have mentioned that games have a lot of employees and they work on titles for years.
One contributing factor is the amount of overtime “thrown” at a game to both program and test it. You know how people in the video game industry complain about months of “crunch time”? That means they’re working overtime every single day.
I remember in the final leg of most games we worked from 9am until midnight (one hour lunch break and one hour dinner break). You’d work that six days a week and have one random day off.
So five hours of overtime per day spread across around 40 people (and this was at a mid-sized studio).
I almost forgot, the last week of testing there would be a “24” where the test team would work for 24 hours straight. Complete idiocy and a huge waste of money.
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