Former EA producer - a $100 million game needs to sell about 6 million just to break even

[SvennoJ]

Darwinianevolution said:

Instead of making one game that costs a hundred million, make ten games that cost ten million each. It'll be easier to recover the costs, cover a bigger audience and have a bettr chance to get a hit IP this way. What's so difficult about this?

The difficulty is, indie gaming killed the AA game segment. They disappeared during the rise of digital game distribution. Nobody wanted to pay $40 for those $10 million budget games anymore. And most gamers only play a few games a year, easier to lure those with high budget games for everyone. 

We went from every game being $60 making it possible for smaller numbers of games like Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom to make a profit, to people feeling anything that's not AAA budget can't cost more than $20-$30, wait for sale, while they still sell in lower numbers. 

The average price for an indie game on Steam is approximately $3.99 to $10...

If it was easier to recover costs, AA games would still exist.

The "budget game" category, which referred to games sold at a lower price point, declined due to consumer perception that cheaper games were of lower quality, which led to poor sales despite their potential value. Instead of creating more budget titles, developers and publishers focused on higher-budget, "AAA" games, as they saw it as a safer investment. This shift was also influenced by the rise of indie games and a general market trend toward expensive, high-production-value titles.


Different from the movie industry where indie movies cost the same as $500 million budget spectacles. Yet gamers only want to pay $70 for the biggest budget games. But maybe the success of Clair Obscure launching at $50 on an AA budget will signal a revival of the $10 million budget games going. Yet in the end, gamers have finite money and finite amount of time to spend. Launching 10 games instead of 1 is also dividing your audience, competing with yourself.