Frenetic Pony
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Mark Darrah (Former Bioware) on why AAA games cost so much
- Thread starter Frenetic Pony
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what's obvious is that the gaming landscape is totally changing.
www.polygon.com
www.pcgamer.com
You can’t make AAA games for just one platform anymore
Nintendo is the exception, as usual... but for how long?
www.polygon.com
The future of gaming belongs to weird little games
After Balatro, Animal Well, Content Warning, and Abiotic Factor in 2024, small games from small studios are innovating as well as anyone else.
The notion of 'game budgets are increasing faster than the audience is' is super well established. This doesn't even need explaining to most people. But it's not actually explaining WHY the costs of games have increased to the absolutely INSANE degree they have.
Marketing budgets today for big AAA games are often bigger than entire budgets for AAA games of just 10 years ago. There's no good reason for this.
Games also seem to go through ever more evolution and iterations and change. This is wildly expensive ultimately. Obviously every game needs playtesting and some level of iterations, but you need leads who minimize this and can have good foresight into what is going to work and whatnot beforehand. This will cut out MASSIVE levels of inefficiency in development timelines.
I really think the whole game industry needs a massive reckoning, and it probably wont ever come cuz it would require publishers to hand more power over to creatives and trust them to execute on a vision.
Marketing budgets today for big AAA games are often bigger than entire budgets for AAA games of just 10 years ago. There's no good reason for this.
Games also seem to go through ever more evolution and iterations and change. This is wildly expensive ultimately. Obviously every game needs playtesting and some level of iterations, but you need leads who minimize this and can have good foresight into what is going to work and whatnot beforehand. This will cut out MASSIVE levels of inefficiency in development timelines.
I really think the whole game industry needs a massive reckoning, and it probably wont ever come cuz it would require publishers to hand more power over to creatives and trust them to execute on a vision.
It's the same trajectory price increases have always been on AFAIK. Nothing has really changed.
I doubt that's the answer. Plenty of creatives can't manage projects and without an executive to make hard calls, games would spend forever in development iterations. Creatives are never happy with their work and always want better. Every game would end up a Star Citizen, or GT or Dreams or The Last Guardian. There either needs be a change in production methods, or a reduction in scope, but that reduction in scope is largely determined by what the consumer (is believed to) expects. If there's enough evidence lower-budget titles can be more profitable, companies will shift.
Hmmm, maybe not. Current capitalism likes exponential growth and shareholders won't be happy with a publisher doing a good job of making and selling profitable games where a different publisher has a behemoth cash-cow like GTA or Fortnite. What's probably needed is private publishers not beholden to share price. Publicly traded publishers probably have too many pressures to just pare back to something sustainable if that is an option.
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
Capcom has been killing it recently, FY 2023/24 was a record for them, without any overtly obvious need for a "budget" asset title as Mark in the above contends must be done. But they've also not subjected themselves to scope creep, RE4 remake isn't any longer than RE4 original, unlike the Final Fantasy 7 remake and it's 3 game long tirade.
Containing the endless scope creep AAA games have subjected themselves to can be as effective as worrying about the per asset budget, depending on the title. EG The Last of Us II apparently lasts 40 hours, for some reason. A decade previous it would've lasted 20 and people would've been impressed with how long that was, and then another game by a different lead at Naughty Dog would've been produced in a relatively not much longer development time and almost doubled their revenue, almost no one that bought The Last of Us II would've skipped it because "it's only 20 hours instead of 40".
Peter Molyneux recognized, and mocked, this trend of scope creep all the way back with Fable 2, declaring the game to have "20k bluebell flowers!" as a marketing bulletpoint. So while I respect Mark, I'd say he's slightly off the mark as it were (heh) when it comes to scope of causes that have driven not just budgets up, but misses altogether that revenues are actually down (for certain devs/publishers) because quite literally less games per year for the market are being made with, quite plausibly, no less demand.
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No man. The actual leaps in costs from one generation to another now is wildly unprecedented.
In the XB1/PS4 era, you could make a AAA game for $30m. Now we're at like $100m minimum. All while advertising budgets are like $60m+ for any given AAA game.
Nothing about today's games are so much more wildly ambitious that merits any of this.
I doubt that's the answer. Plenty of creatives can't manage projects and without an executive to make hard calls, games would spend forever in development iterations.
I did not say that creatives should be put in full charge of everything. Nor was I suggesting that just any creatives be given more power. I've been a long standing advocate that publishers need to have their fingers in the project in order to keep it on track.
I'm simply proposing that the current balance is still put too much towards the publisher. And not enough effort is being put on getting the right creatives in place, who aren't just 'dreamers' and can actually combine a creative vision with a practical roadmap towards completion. I know game development is hard, but there's simply no way there isn't extreme inefficiencies given what we're seeing now.
Nobody can rationally explain why Spiderman 2 cost $300m to make. When it's really just a minor evolution of Spiderman 1, which was only a fraction of that cost.
This doesn't need to be normal, and I find it ludicrous to just accept that as the case, and walk around one of the sources of the problem and not even question it.
The trajectory is the same.
The cost of games
Take a dataset of over 250 games, their development costs, their year of release, what they sold for and big they were. What can we learn about the trends and what it means for the industry?
In fact cost increases may even have slowed down. We're not at trillion dollar games in 2025 (what do we think GTA6 cost?!).
Who's refusing to question it? I simply pointed out that's the same trajectory it's been on since forever. It's not unprecedented - it's 100% precedented if you look at the data. Years ago devs could see we were heading that way. It's exactly the same as the housing crisis. Completely obviously going to happen, but no-one did anything.
Yes, something needs to be done about increasing costs and game management and we can talk about that. But no, it's not some bizarro out-of-the-blue problem but something we've been leading up to for decades.
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I don't understand. How does this relate to the historical cost-increase of game development?
well it's offset/amortized cause it's incremental (instead of carving new path every gen like it's some compulsive thing to do)?
PoE is GaaS, an AA game created by a small studio. Doesn't really reflect on the standalone AAA cost increases. On the graph, it'd be one of the lower points populated by indies and smaller projects. NMS would be similar, a low relatively low initial cost with limited content that then self-funded its growth over the yeas. I wonder how the cost to produce PoE compares to ARPGs of yesteryear? Did it still follow the doubling every five years or so?
It's mainly a spiritual successor of Diablo2. IDK if rest of ARPG are even comparable because apparently the influence is too great and also too easy to get lost while trying to make something similar. There's no comparable concept of "endgame-play" .
It's fascinating because the serverside dependence is so great it wouldn't be a leap to stream graphics therefore bypass "generations" entirely. Maybe it's just waiting to happen with all those AI cards in place (remotely).
This is an idea I came up with years ago, I called it the repository. A publisher like E.A should have a library of every asset made for every game they've ever published, Imagine an E.A studio is making a modern military shooter
how much time is going to be spent modelling, texturing, animating and recording the audio for an AK47 why, it's already been done countless times, same for every other weapon that will be used in the game. not just weapons but there are countless things that are somewhat generic in games lampposts, cars, road textures, grass, brick, wood, pots, pans, crates you cant have a first person shooter without crates, all sorts of things. Obviously you will still need unique assets in your game but there's a lot of stuff that doesn't need to be unique.
how much time is going to be spent modelling, texturing, animating and recording the audio for an AK47 why, it's already been done countless times, same for every other weapon that will be used in the game. not just weapons but there are countless things that are somewhat generic in games lampposts, cars, road textures, grass, brick, wood, pots, pans, crates you cant have a first person shooter without crates, all sorts of things. Obviously you will still need unique assets in your game but there's a lot of stuff that doesn't need to be unique.
They have already been doing this and there are third party asset stores as well.
Assets are even created with considerations for reuse in mind.
Assets are even created with considerations for reuse in mind.
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I have an even better idea. They can also share the game engine and work on improving it together!
What an unreal idea.
This game was made by a single person a less than a month apparently..
So I believe that gaming is just too inflated. While I like the last of us, the story is not that good. Yet they spend millions on motion capture, voice actors, Hollywood composers. Whereas the game could be made with unreal assets in a few months and be nearly indistinguishable from the end result, minus the cutscenes
So they took my advice
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