| EpicRandy said: 100M budget for development alone is still far from the norms among all AAA. I Know The Last of Us 2, is rumored to have reached this figure but cannot find any reliable info on other exclusives that did recently. But still, that kind of budget is only unlocked for new entries of an already well established, well loved, successful ip and when there's basically no risk related to the investment. Most of your source actually reflect this. Reliable information on the subject is scarce so there's guessing from my part but I'll argue that 30m-60m should still provide enough budget for many AAA and is probably the kind of budget you find for most new ip AAA titles and most sequel. Uncharted 4 budget was rumored to be about 50M.
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Look up the dev cost of any AAA title. Then tack on another $25M - $50M for marketing costs, which are not included in those development costs. Have any idea how much an ad spot in the Superbowl cost? $5.6M... for 30 seconds.
But here is another way to factor in dev costs.
Let take a AAA studio for instance. That has only 100 people working on a game ( a lot less than hat we know work on these games, but lets just go with this). Now these people get an average salary of $130k. Let's just keep it simple and leave it at that, because while there would be some getting more and some getting less, there are also lots of contract-based people that work on the game that come and go. Like the QA testers, actors, a music composer...etc that I am not factoring in. So this is a best-case scenario type thing.
That team working on a game for 3 years would cost $39M to fund. And for 4 years? $52M. And this s before you add in equipment, research costs, outsourcing costs, rent, electricity, localization, legal..etc. And at this point, you haven't even factored in marketing either.
I think a lot of people grossly underestimate how much most of these games cot to make. There is a reason why there are companies in south America,China, korea...etc that singularly specialize in outsourced asset development. Or why Sony has studios whose singular purpose is to build assets to help out any of their name studios when making games.
Last edited by Intrinsic - on 18 September 2020
