AAA video games regularly cost over $300,000,000 to make reveals insider

The average triple-A video game reportedly costs more than most movies to make, although this seems to be more of a Western problem.

Unlike movies, you almost never hear about the budgets for video games. They’re never confirmed officially and even leaks are rare, and usually due to a mistake on the part of the publisher.

Even so, it’s never been more obvious that games, especially the big triple-A ones from the likes of Sony and Activision, are more expensive to make than ever.

In fact, it’s estimated that high-end games now routinely cost more than $300 million to make, which is roughly £225 million.

This comes from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, one of the industry’s most trusted sources of insider information, who shared the information in the wake of Epic Games’ mass layoffs and Sony’s closure of Dark Outlaw Games.

‘Exact budgets of video game productions can be tough to corroborate,’ wrote Schreier on Bluesky, ‘but the numbers I’ve heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more — sometimes much more! — which I think helps explain the current state of the industry.’

While some major blockbuster movies like James Cameron’s Avatar series are even more expensive to make, this means AAA games have higher budgets than most movies, including the entire Harry Potter franchise, DC’s most recent Superman movie, and the majority of Marvel’s cinematic output (when not adjusting for inflation).

Schreier adds that this applies to games primarily made in the US and Canada, and that these large budgets are ‘almost entirely’ spent on developer salaries.

When asked if such budgets are considered too low or too high, Schreier breaks down the maths and explains, ‘If you sell a game at $70 and pocket $49 on every sale… you’d need to sell more than six million copies just to break even on a $300 million budget, and that’s before marketing.’

As shocking as this sounds at first, it does make sense and not just when you consider inflation. Thanks to the Insomniac Games hack in 2023, it was discovered that Sony’s Spider-Man 2 game had a budget of $300 million.

This was a noticeable jump from the leaked budgets for two other first party PlayStation games – The Last Of Us Part 2 ($220 million) and Horizon Forbidden West ($212 million) – and considered surprising at the time, but now it seems to have become the norm in Western development.

What’s especially depressing is that these inflated budgets are wholly unnecessary even within the triple-A space. While no exact figure was given, the most recent Assassin’s Creed game – Assassin’s Creed Shadows – is said to have only cost somewhere over €100 million according to Ubisoft, which is about £86 million for one of the best looking games of last year.

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Japanese games are never that expensive either. There are no official figures, but the budget for Resident Evil Requiem – again, one of the best-looking titles of the year – is rumoured to be less than $100 million. Meanwhile, the famously frugal Nintendo is believed to have spent just north of $100 million on the two most recent Zelda games, which they apparently regard as an unusually high figure.

And of course, there’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a visually gorgeous game that was made for less than $10 million (per The New York Times), which comes out as just £7.5 million. Combined with the game being priced at £45 instead of £70, and selling over five million copies, it’s certainly made its money back.

Bigger American companies, however, seem unwilling to learn anything from Clair Obscur’s success and rather than reducing budgets their only answers to the problem seem to be laying off staff and thinking up more unpopular methods of squeezing extra money out of customers.

For example, earlier this month, it was reported that Sony was experimenting with dynamic pricing in the UK, where it would make games cheaper or more expensive depending on the customer.

Now, it’s reported that the scheme has made its way to the US, with people seeing different prices for Astro Bot as part of the PlayStation Store’s spring sale.

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