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Zkuq on 07 February 2025
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Jizz_Beard_thePirate said:

Wonder Woman game has already cost $100 million; “years away from release, if it ever makes it to market”

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/wonder-woman-game-has-already-cost-100-million-%E2%80%9Cyears-away-from-release-if-it-ever-makes-it-to-market%E2%80%9D.1680545/

Why in the fuck do modern games cost so damn much yet the results are so mid. While WW remains to be see how good, mid or bad it is, a lot of games these days have insane budgets for what really shouldn't be the norm.

Unsurpsingly it's frustratingly hard, maybe even impossible, to find any data on my suspicion, but I suspect asset creation and visuals are taking up a larger portion of development costs than before. Game engines aren't rocket science, and a lot of games use 'pre-built' engines (Unreal, Unity etc.) anyway. Games don't seem so much more complex that I wouldn't expect design costs to have skyrocketed. I'm sure programming costs etc. have gone up a lot too, but I have my doubts about them being the culprit either.

I bet it's assets, especially those related to visuals, and everything else related to visuals as well, because I imagine creting higher-quality visuals scales quite poorly: If you double the dimensions of a texture, you suddenly have four times the detail. I imagine there's a similar effect going on for other visuals-affecting assets and stuff too. Lighting? No, you can't just bake in simple lighting, you need to complex lighting to look as good as possible, so there's probably lots of stuff to tweak there. And everything has to work at different times of day as well - but wait, there's different weathers too, and now the same lighting has to somehow work with all of them. And what about that wet clothing thing mentioned in this thread earlier? Visuals, zero effect on gameplay. As tech allows better and better visuals, someone has to actually create those visuals too, and complexity keeps increasing. And of course the next game has to be unique enough, so much of this probably can't be reused.

Increased complexity probably has a significant effect on programming as well, but personally I have a hard time seeing how it would be increasing even as fast as asset creation costs (unless perhaps you're creating Baldur's Gate 3, which most games certainly aren't). But what do I really know.