AAA game budgets continue to grow rapidly and often reach or even exceed $300 million. This was reported by Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, noting that such amounts are becoming the new norm for large projects.
According to him, the exact costs of game development are often difficult to confirm due to a lack of transparency from publishers, but the estimates "circulating" in the industry indicate budgets of $300 million and above - sometimes significantly higher. Schreier clarified that this primarily refers to projects created in the USA and Canada. In other regions, costs may be significantly lower due to cheaper labor, since the bulk of the budget goes to developers' salaries and operating expenses, rather than compensation for top managers.
If you sell a game for $70 and get $49 from each sale (30% goes to the store, assuming all sales are digital), you'll need to sell over 6 million copies just to recoup the $300 million cost - and that's before marketing.
At the same time, AAA games crossed the $300 million mark several years ago. For example, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 from Insomniac Games cost approximately $315 million in 2023 - almost three times more than the budget of the first part. Additional pressure on the project's economy was exerted by payments under the Marvel license, which reduced the game's profitability for Sony.
The Call of Duty series demonstrates even larger sums. For example, the development of Black Ops III (2015) from Treyarch cost more than $450 million, taking into account the full life cycle of the product, including post-release support. In the future, costs only grew: Modern Warfare (2019) from Infinity Ward cost Activision more than $640 million, and Black Ops Cold War (2020) exceeded $700 million. According to unofficial data, the budget for Battlefield 6 from EA may also exceed $400 million.
Denis Dyack, head of Apocalypse Studios, creator of Legacy of Kain and Eternal Darkness, spoke critically about the current state of the industry. In his opinion, the problem lies not only in the increase in costs, but also in the development and financing model itself.
Dyack notes that many players today have no interest in big-budget releases and are increasingly expressing dissatisfaction with the direction in which the industry is moving. According to him, games are approved and created taking into account decisions that do not meet the expectations of the audience, and rising prices only increase user irritation.
He also emphasized that the long development cycles of AAA projects do not allow for a quick response to criticism: games are created for years, and even if they want to, studios can only make minor changes at later stages. As a result, player disappointment, according to his forecast, will continue for at least the next few years.