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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Definitely varies by game and stupid but basic things like paying the employees (obviously) potentially multiple studios with hundreds of people. That adds up daily. If music is a big part of the game, things like a live orchestra for the score certainly isn’t cheap. Certification for each console release cost money. Some games can easily take 5+ years to make. If you “reboot” in development all the previous time can be considered extra money spent. New hardware for the dev pcs is expensive and console dev kits these days can be thousands. Localization/translation teams, separate alpha beta testers have to be paid. Marketing/advertising, voice actors, all type of things. Other people I’m sure will certainly go into more detail but it comes down to time and all the different groups and studios add up.
Salaries.
I checked Call of Duty MW 3 as an example, and that has 9347 people in its credits. Granted, not all of these people will have played a major role, but many of them will.
To keep the maths simple, imagine that they spent Half a billion. Game took 5 years for 1000 people to create. If those people on average make 100k per year, thats your whole budget.
The second large part is advertisement and media, which is often a huge chunk of the cost of making a AAA game.
The programmers are a huge part of the cost. Employees aren’t cheap for software, then the special software (game engines) hardware (their high end computers) the office spaces used, etc cost money. Then comes marketing, pre release distribution, etc. to get the game to the masses.
Figure out how many man hours go into such games, figuring each designer, coder, etc. are making $100k/yr plus benefits
There are different expenses AAA companies have, especially in a bigger scale, that smaller companies don’t have.
For example Marketing for AAA companies takes sometimes up to the same cost as the development of the game itself.
Also AAA companies grew to a size which forces them to earn more money. Therefor they development games that have to appeal to a wider audience, not just a nieche like indy games. What that means is, they more often trash ideas, start from scratch or rework major parts of the game, which prolongs the development cost. Additionally they have expenses for bigger offices, translators, legal, HR, but also for R&D.
AAA companies look for billion dollar games. Not for million dollar games.
In short:
More people = more cost.
Bigger Audience = more advertisement cost.
500 million dollars is 5000 people earning 100k working on a game for one year. No game acctually has 5000 people working on it earning an average 100k on it but games also dont just take 1 year they often take something like 5-7 years and salaries are not the only cost a game studio has. So lets say half the cost is salary the other half is all the stuff you need to run a game company like rent, utlties, equipment, licenses and so on + marketing the game. Then you can have 500 people working 7 years on a game for 70k anual salary on average or 1000 people for 3,5 years.
A major game is at least as complicated as a major animation based movie. They have a lot of the same components with a script, lots of foreground and background scenes, character animation, voice actors, music, etc. but the game can actually be significantly longer than a movie and does not always follow an exact chronological path like a movie does as players have some control over what happens next.
When the game is released and users are going to start playing it, they need download servers, servers to run the game, support personnel, and a huge amount of internet bandwidth to run it all. Often times, a development team of many of the same people who originally wrote it already working on the next expansion pack. In short, the game’s costs do not end when it is released. The costs continue on for as long as people are playing it and new people are buying it.
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.
hundreds of employees working for like 5 years on a game, and if they have decent working condition there is stuff like PTO, paid sick leave, also just imagine the monthly rent for the buildings, HR, marketing and everything around it, basicially massive company/teams whatever working for like 5 years on something to produce 1 product
I would LOVE to see a legit breakdown of an AAA title and not just wild inherent speculation.
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