Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War cost $700 million all the way back in 2020.

Battlefield 6 reportedly cost "well north" of $400 million last year.

Back in 2023, Spiderman 2 cost $315 million.

These kind of insane budgets have sadly become commonplace, and it's not sustainable.

These games can partly justify their high budgets by their huge sales potential. Gears isn't that big. I haven't done the maths but it will need to sell around 9 million copies at full price to turn profit.

The average AAA game doesn't cost this much. Ghost of Yotei cost just $60 million (maybe a $100~ with marketing) and will probably sell a lot more on PS5 alone than E-Day on all platforms. Yotei will likely hold its price much better as well.

E-Day looks amazing though. So good luck to the team.

E-Day does indeed look very good, though I have doubts about it selling well enough to justify its budget.

Looking at the Western AAA sector as a whole, I'd say things have gotten unsustainable when you consider the amount of losses, layoffs, and studio closures over the last couple of years.

Some are able to keep on trucking, but the industry as a whole is far from healthy.

Paying developers has got expensive AF.

Spiderman 2 cost:

• $117m in wages
• $41m in bonuses
• $28m in welfare and benefits
• $23m for external developers.

For the direct headcount (insomniac employees working only on SM2) they paid an average of $20k per month of development.

$20k.... Per developer each month, wtf.

Over a 5 year dev period they only averaged 135 internal developers solely working on SM2 but those developers cost them $157 million.

Their internal developers shared with other projects cost them $65m.

I think the spiderman 2 costs really highlight how these big sequels can spiral out of control. A lot of the bonuses are probably based on overall studio success which would relate to the success of previous products. So, in some ways it's a bit unfair to count them in the budget but Sony seem to use a strict time period calculation for calculating costs.

Also, as a california studio the benefits and wages are going to be high to retain staff after such a big hit. The spiderman 2 wrap party was budgeted at $1m! 

Not surprising. 7 years since Gears 5. They must be paying People Can Fly as well.

Like them or hate them, some of these AAA developers need to learn a thing or two from Nintendo and how they budget their games. I can only imagine the amount of money that is wasted on games like this. To many American companies burn millions of dollars because their spending is not managed well.

I really love the Gears series, played and beat 1-5, and I am in no way a Nintendo fan (never owned a NS1 and no plan on buying a NS2) but one thing they do extremely well is manage their money well. Hearing that really is frustrating because if they game does not sell extremely well, it will impact the franchise in a bad way. From the videos that I saw, there is no reason this game needs to have a budget of $400 million (if its true)

The reason Japanese games are cheaper is because people get paid less. Is that really something to celebrate? Obviously there needs to be a balance, and maybe $1m wrap parties are not it, but people getting paid a lot on projects like Spider-man seem like a great thing. Aren't we always complaining about how much inequality is in the world and that not enough of profits to back to the workers.

Or should we celebrate companies like Capcom and Fromsoft paying new graduates at entry level less than the minimum wage in a country like the UK(yes you'd actually get paid more working at McDonalds in the UK straight from school than working as a graduate at Capcom)

Nintendo has two clear advantages here, most of their games require less man hours to make, and most of their developers are in Japan where game development is much cheaper.

You can't really say "just look at Nintendo" because developing a game like Mario Kart or DK Bananza in Japan is always going to be FAR cheaper than developing a game like Horizon or God of War in America.

When other Devs make a Nintendo style game like a 3D Platformer they're much lower budget too, Astro Bot and the upcoming Spyro both only had a 3 year dev time.

They'd have to just stop making big openworld games lol. I'd be interested to see the Budget of ToTK because even with re-using a ton from BOTW it took 6 years. If ToTK was developed in the USA it probably would have cost $250-$350m too.

Where exactly the money went on Gears and why it ballooned so much I'm not sure, but the solution is not to just learn from Nintendo. Because that would require them to make different games in a different country.

He was talking about Nintendo games, not japanese made games.
And while it may be true that japanese developers are paid less than american ones (who are probably the most expensive in the world, by salaries)....
what I think he means is the scope of nintendo games.

Nitnendo often don't do voices for characters (or limited if they do), they have text instead (followed by talking sounds that are used for all regions in the world). they barely have story lines that need writers or authors to think up / write (they stick with simple plots), they don't have mo-cap and famous actors performing that need to be paid, they don't license expensive music ect ect ect.  Even graphically and such, nintendo just values other things, and knows what it needs for games to be fun and sell. Their thing isn't to sell you a action-movie turned game, with super realistic graphics that is a shooter.  

Btw look at Capcom, they make fantastic games. I can't help but think part of it is also the mentality of these devs. 
Western developers waste money on the silliest of things (ei. consultants like sweet baby inc and such).