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?
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Employee salaries. You’ve got hundreds (at least) of highly skilled workers on a project that lasts ~5 years or more.
The average game developer salary is ~$116k in the US, for 200 staff over 5 years that’s ~$116m just in direct salary payments. Plus costs for support staff, equipment, office space, software licenses and so on that those staff require.
That’s probably an underestimate on the staffing requirements too, as I’m pretty sure a lot of modern AAA games average more than 200 full time employees over their lifecycle, and once you’re done paying your own employees you’ve still got to pay for things like music licensing and advertising costs etc.
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