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Ryuu96 said:
shikamaru317 said:

Yeah, these AAA budget increases aren't sustainable for sure, the bubble is heading for a pop soon, I've even seen developers saying it. We've gone from the average AAA costing maybe $80m in combined marketing and development costs a decade ago, to the average AAA now costing probably $150m, and the upper end now over $300m, with Sony now having set aside $385m for the upcoming Spider-Man 3 according to the Insomniac leak.

I've mostly seen developers say it Tbf...It sometimes feels like developers are begging the industry to listen that this shit ain't sustainable but managers aren't listening. I don't know how anyone can look at $300m budgets which are rapidly increasing as being sustainable in the long term, especially when AAAs take 5-6 years to create nowadays. You spend $200-$300m on a game, developing it over 6 years, with hundreds of employees, it flops, there goes that studio and hundreds of employees. It's madness.

It's weird to me that they just keep driving the AAA budgets higher and higher. Even the movie industry largely stopped wild budget increases because they realized it just wasn't sustainable any longer, which is why of the top 10 most expensive movies to date, only a single one is from this decade (Avatar 2), the rest were all done in the 2000's or 2010's before the movie studios realized they need to shrink the budgets somewhat in order to prevent a total collapse, like the one that the AAA games industry is currently heading towards. Movie budgets for high end blockbusters have now largely leveled out at around $200-250m. I really think the AAA industry needs to go back to basics a bit, shrink the studios a bit, shorten development cycles a bit, make the games a bit smaller and less detailed, and get the average AAA budget back down to maybe $100-130m, with the higher end AAA's holding at maybe $200-250m, instead of shooting up to $300m or more like they have been recently. 

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 06 February 2024