What's mind boggling is why does spiderman 2 cost so much. It's not a massive open world game and the while the graphics look nice they are using lot of the same Map as spiderman 1 not even the best ps5 has to offer 

Because people expect to be paid when they know they have made a hit game (Spider-Man 1) the first time around. 

Say you have a studio, maybe the first time out you have a hit game you can get by with everyone being young and just happy to have a job. 

But once you hit pay dirt with a hit game ... guess what? 

Now everyone wants to be paid more and fairly so, they want to be paid the same as other high end studios. They now have that hit game on their resume and can just leave your studio and go elsewhere and easily get a job somewhere else because everyone will see on the resume "hey you worked on Spider-Man on PS4, that was a big hit". 

If I'm a top end artist who is insanely talented and I know my work in the previous game is part of the reason the game looks great, yes you are going to pay me more for a sequel when I see the previous game sold like 10 million copies+. Industry workers talk easily enough too, if I find out someone doing the same job at me on say GTA6 is getting double my salary, I will ask for a raise too. That's not greed either, it's paying people their fair share, you want top end programmers, artists, etc., you have to pay to keep them. 

You want to keep talented teams like the ones that make the Spider-Man games together, you have to pay and the more success you have the less chance you have to being able to employ newbies in the business who will work for cheap. Otherwise those people will leave and then there is no guarantee whatsoever that future games will have the same quality. 

Then they need to start using AI or get Korean talent cause they are pushing graphics and art to new levels. For reference spiderman ps4 cost 90 million to make being built from scratch, spider man 2 is using 70% the same map that's just insane  

California being an expensive place, higher salaries being paid, mo cap and actor salaries, Disney payment for the IP. Although 300mil still seems very excessive

Spider-Man PS4 cost $128 million on the game itself, another $50 million almost on marketing from Sony's internal documents. 

Spider-Man 2 cost $300 million without marketing. 

Look high end visuals cost money ... every Hollywood studio would be first on the boat if they could get cheaper CG and keep the quality the same, but they can't. You have to pay people. 

AI is overhyped at this point too (in order to get people to invest in it they need to overstate what it can do), can it change things in the future, sure, but lets also have some perspective. It's a lot of buzz words to get investment but the actual technology is still extremely raw and very far away from being able to wholesale replace talented people. 

They've pumped billions of dollars into Google Translate, Apple Translate and other translation programs for 15+ years now and it still can't learn or understand to speak/comprehend a language properly, which is something a 5 year old can learn. AI translation screws up even doing basic translations let alone nuanced conversations. 

Same thing with AI driving, they've been trying to get that working for years now and it's still on the back burner. The way humans think and make decisions is not that easy for a machine to learn, Google and Tesla and all these companies would bend over backwards and kiss their own rear end to have a language program that can learn as well as a 5 year old child learns a language or drives a car even at the level of a 16-year-old. They can't even get to that level after huge investment, years of time, huge computational power, etc. etc. Let alone creativity. 

Before we think AI can replace humans in high level artistic fields under high pressure, it may want to prove it can even learn English or Mandarian or Spanish like a child can, because after almost 20 years, they're still not able to get that done. 

Voice acting?  Mismanagement?  Who knows.  But AI is going to drive costs down.  Nvidia is one of the biggest companies on the planet and is putting resources behind it.  

100%.  One of the reasons I love From Software and Nintendo....  focused on playing and not watching.  

And I think 10 to 20 hours is perfect length for most games.  

The 128 million and 300 million are outside of the Disney payment for the IP for Spidey 1 + 2. Those numbers are just the game budget alone. 

Spider-Man 3 will probably cost $400+ million, then probably another $50-75 mill on marketing on top of that, *then* Disney also gets their cut on top of that, though that isn't dissimilar to what 3rd parties face because they have to also pay a 30% licensing fee in most cases on various platforms. 

The best soccer team, Real Madrid, pays all the staff what they think is fair, not what the staff think is fair. And if there is someone who is not satisfied, the door is open for them to leave whenever they want. Those who leave are rarely for money, but for other reasons. And those who reject an offer from Real Madrid are rarely because of money, but rather for other reasons.

Self-awareness, the sense of self, is what moves people.

Of course money is necessary and is always taken into account. But I see little future for a company where people put money as the main thing.

Think you're confusing one thing ... in game development, your top artists/programmers/etc. are the PLAYERS. The staff are the ones that magic the games worth a damn, no one wants to play a Zelda game made by the Philips cd-i team, it's only because it's the EPD Zelda team that those games have any worth to begin with. 

So if you win a championship or they have high stats, in sports generally you have to pay your players more when their contract is up. 

In game development, most staff don't have contracts that last past a single game's development. So if the game is a hit, you're going to be paying more to keep those people. 

Or like in pro sports, when those athletes are free agents, lots of teams want them and are willing to pay them to come play for them instead. It's the same in the game business. 

There's a whole bunch of other practical issues too, like say you say "well just pay the head producer of the team and pay everyone else peanuts" ... well the head producer then goes "well I don't want to work here anymore, I like working with the staff I had, I'm going elsewhere". If I'm a top end producer/game designer, I don't want to work with a bunch of untalented people, I want talented staff around me, the same way a superstar player will want other talented players to play with in basically any team sport.