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

[JackHandy]

TheRealSamusAran said:

Ashadelo said:

Meanwhile....

Megabonk - ~3M (Steam est.) - Very low (solo dev)
Hollow Knight - sold 15M+ - cost to develop Very low (~$37k Kickstarter)
Hollow Knight: Silksong - ~5M - cost to develop Very low (small team)
Stardew Valley - sold41M+ - cost to develop Minimal (solo dev)
Palworld - sold 25M+ / 32M players - cost to develop $6.7M
Terraria - sold 64M+ - cost to develop Very low (small team)
Hotline Miami ~ sold 4.9M Steam - cost to develop Very low (2 devs)

The list goes on and on. These massive over bloated budgets are a developer/publisher issue. You don't need 100 million + to make a great game

Good list of 2D games and Palworld, but neither of those games are like The Witcher or Cyberpunk or Metroid Prime or Marvel Spider-Man or the upcoming Wolverine. Gamers like you are always praising indie games while saying every studio should just lower their budget, but I don't think anyone wants Wolverine to be like Silksong or Terraria when it finally comes out. "Small" budget games offer a different experience from big budget games, when will people start to realize that?

I don't remember many kids back in 1990 playing SMB 3 for the first time and complaining that it wasn't AAA. And you can say the same about all games up to a point. A great game is a great game, and people will buy them regardless. The industry would be fine if they scaled back. After all, look at Fortnite. Not that I'd advocate for crap like that, but it's not really pushing the hardware, you know? So if the industry collectively decided to go in another direction, people would follow.