The Insane Cost Of Game Development!!

Former producer at EA & Retro Studios Bryan Walker details why game development is so expensive.
Full Interview - • Metroid Prime 2 - 20th...
#gaming #games #concord
Join this channel to get access to perks:
/ @kiwitalkz

[@adam145]

The worst part is that if a game fails then developers get fired and CEO still gets a 10 million bonus for cutting costs. Budgets are bloated to the extremes and it's like the management only sees the way of earning money by throwing more money at the project. It's a shame that most of AA gaming is dead for big publishers because they still want 10 million copies sold from a title made by a handful of people. We already lost Prince of Persia, Crash/Spyro and Valkyrie Profile.

[@2drealms196]

AA games (games with 10-20 staff) that were successful in the 90s were failing left and right in the 2000s, which is why the publishers gave up on them, only big budget AAA games stood out from the crowd. Perhaps AA games should be attempted again, now that tools like Unreal (despite all its flaws) allow far higher productivity.

[@verendale1789]

@@2drealms196 Indies are slowly turning in to "AA" as the scope and size of many indie projects are now dwarfing what used to be "Indie" 5-10 years ago.

[@AshleysBallistics]

This is incredibly insightful. If a 100 million budget needs 6 million units sold to *Break Even* then Square Enix & EA's sales expectations arent that unreasonable... That means Final Fantasy 16 & Rebirth were CATASTROPHIC flops 😬

[@ADreamingTraveler]

Sony paid Square Enix a ton of money for the 3 game timed exclusivity deal so I don't think it was really a flop for them.

[@lulkLogan]

Great to hear from a developer with experience in the solidly AA space. We need to get back to that.

[@KIWITALKZ]

Bryan is a big deal he worked as a producer at Retro Studios, EA & Activision. He knows his stuff.

[@petercottantail7850]

​@@KIWITALKZ does that mean he is only speaking from EA and Activision's budget for making games, I cant help but think the pricing for making a game is going or be these 9 figure numbers for developers like them. especially with a shareholder's expectation giving them incentive to make more than they did last year meaning breaking even is never the goal in the first place

[@KIWITALKZ]

Not just EA & Activision, his resume is long hes worked at the following places: Eidos, EA, Retro Studios, Imangi Studios, Boss Fight Entertainment, Deck Nine Games, Aspyr Media, Activision. So EA, Activision & Retro Studios are the big ones that he has worked at but you can see he has worked at smaller studios as well so he has a good overall view on the industry. I think it's important to note something that we didnt cover in the interview is the USA itself is one of the most expensive places to make games especially in the Metropolises e.g L.A., NY, Austin, Seattle etc. cause salaries are so much higher than say in Japan.

[@Howitchewstofeel5gum]

People say stuff like that all the time, but then, by and large, they don't actually show up to buy the AA games lol. Lost Crown, Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Kunitsu-Gami, they all underperform.

[@ronniefazzio6979]

⁠​⁠@@Howitchewstofeel5gumI bought Lost Crown at launch and it was excellent. It’s a shame the team was disbanded.

[@ICharlyl]

I wonder whose expectations are to have bigger and more detailed worlds, with battle passes and stuff. Because I certainly believe most gamers don't really care about it, and that's what I believe it's the disconnection between developers (or suits at least) and gamers. If anything, most acclaimed games that have really thrived these past 2 years are smaller, more focused and contained games and the backlash has been on AAA unfinished open world ones. Of course the best selling games at the moment are live services, but they're too few compared with the amount that have failed catastrophically trying to solidify themselves in the mainstream.

[@Raul_27]

Selling 3 million copies is hard enough. Imagine 6, wtf.

[@EastyyBlogspot]

I have a feeling but I cannot prove, there may be a certain element of wastage, either way too many people on a project, poor management with perhaps constant shifts in focus, and making changes

[@LiraeNoir]

It's way more than a feeling, ask (privately, mostly) people who worked on those. There's a lot of wastage. The issue being, what is wastage? Does spending time re-doing the very basic, the core of the melee tempo and distance with half a dozen different prototypes a waste? For some games it is, for some production timing it is, for some studios it is. Other games aren't good because they did NOT do that type of thing. Does recording 5 variations of each bark a waste, so that you don't hear the very exact same "ouch" 3000 times in your playthrough? Maybe. Depend on the game. Does listening to the executive who's nephew just played the latest hotness, and replacing a core feature with another totally different core feature less than a year before shipping, a waste? Probably, but also if your mid project is canceled because you do NOT do it, then the whole of the production was wasted. So it's not black and white, nor easy. The general trending goal is to work with a team that already shipped a game, to control scope starting with the amount of details on assets, and to frontload as much as possible in pre-production. Better to have a 10 people team work on pre-prod for a full year (or even more) and come out at the end with a very clear and stable goal and image of what the final product should be, then spend the actual hundreds of devs production on execution, then to have such a huge team without focus and aim and sense of urgency (which is not the same as crunch, despite what some managers might think) to release.

[@davidtitanium22]

Wastage often can only be realized in hindsight, while in planning stage you feel like you have to account for anything going wrong

[@EastyyBlogspot]

@davidtitanium22 I dunno I have experienced it at the time with managers not having a set plan or idea in place and keep changing it which did waste lots of time their and then.....but then have another manager knows exactly what is needed and bam all done quickly and efficiently

[@Yukimaru0]

A good chunk of the issue is the publishing companies themselves over valuing their role in brining these games to market. The CEO for any given company is not worth $1M plus in pay per year. Yes they do work and make decisions that push the company forward but the problem comes from the fact that everyone at the top feels like their pay should be guaranteed when the reality is they are the owners of the company and their pay should vary bases off of the actual profit generated like any owner of a small business. If you don't make profit your still required to pay your employees even if it means you get paid less than they do.

[@AlexDiaz-gw5ov]

It depends on the platform and initial sale price. For a $70 game. A 100M budget game can break even with 2M copies if they were sold at $70. And it needs 2.5M for being profitable. If sold at $70. If it is a $50 game, it needs 3M copies. And if it is a $30 game, it will need 5M copies. That is to break even. On these parameters. This is why 200M games need to sell a minimum of 10M copies to be profitable. As not all copies will sell at $70. Looking at a recent example: Dragon Age: The Veilgard cost was at minimum $100M, but probably more like $125M. It needs around 3M copies at $70 to break even. That is not happening as the game price is already fluctuating from $50 to $60 depending the platform. It is said to have sold less than 2M copies across all platforms. We don't have official numbers. But that is the current estimate. That game within 10 years of release ( which is now the time frame considered as "lifetime sales" for most games) is bound to get to 5M copies. But because the game will be $10 after year five. The sale price average of that game will be $30 at most. Meaning that the game will never even break even.

[@TheAccursedHunter01]

Probably my favorite part of this interview. A sobering glimpse at a subject most know nothing about.

[@itsBATION]

0:55 wrong. Nintendo games shut all this down, smaller teams, smaller budget, great games, great sales numbers. The problem is everyone else thinks they need to jam pack it with stuff to not only sell but to be the most profitable game than the one before it

[@n1nj4l1nk]

The amount of stuff isn't the problem it's having supper detailed realistic graphics. No one needs to be able to see a characters pores or the environment reflecting in their eyes, it adds nothing to the game. Look at Mario games, they look amazing but from a technical view they aren't that impressive the artstyle does nearly all of the lifting and because they don't spend the best part of 5 years on graphics they can polish the gameplay.

[@OneRandomVictory]

Nintendo is releasing games that run on an 8 year old console atm. And even then, they decided to charge $70 for the first time with last year's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. They've even gone on record about the cost of development rising with their next console. Yes, Nintendo is doing better than most atm but this is an industry wide problem.

[@Tomtycoon]

I don't get this, we are at a point where devs know how games are suppose to work and should be very efficient at it. We have engines that do all kinds of thing for us. We figured out phisics, lightning, assets, controlls. There is so much they can take with them from game to game, 30 years of 3D game experience. You don't start from scratch each time. And still it takes 5+ years to make a game?

[@chillnspace777]

That's what I find weird. Engines like UE5 and the staff sizes now you'd think they would be more stream lined?

[@KIWITALKZ]

We talk about it earlier in the interview but what really balloons the cost is art, animation tools have gotten better but creating high poly art is very very difficult and takes 5x as long cause of how much more is involved, thats why major studios these days outsource for additional help on art. For example, there are 1000 people at Rockstar India alone working on just art for GTA VI and thats without even considering what the other Rockstar Studios (San Diego, Edinburgh, NY etc.) are working on within the game.

[@chillnspace777]

@KIWITALKZ holy crap!! Just for some of the art assets? Man, that insane. I need to hear the full interview now, even more so now. Thank you

[@steeltarkus58]

In software development in general, new features will clash with the existing codebase and will require reworking stuff no matter how much you plan ahead, on top of that for games you have to take into account not only raw performance but also consistent frametimes, as well as probably very strict deadlines.

[@Kniffel101]

Well, if you _do_ use old assets, you'll have approximately a couple thousand people on social media complaining that you are "lazy" because you're saving work by putting it somewhere else. =)

[@ItApproaches]

Devs need to stand up to the CEO's and publishers, say "LOOK, we are making a normal sized game, not some biggest game ever made, we aren't going for 4K photorealism. We are going to stick with what worked all these decades. Making FUN games that are to scale with the budget given! Don't like it, fire us all and you wont have any products!"

[@Valoric]

Need to realise there ZERO passion in the executive level for game creation. At least that’s what appears to be the case. Honestly if challenged like that, they’d probably go and invest their money into farmland or some crypto scam. They _don’t care_

[@ItApproaches]

@@Valoric I am aware. Which is why dev companies that start up, like Larian and such should NEVER EVER sell themselves to a big company. Like how Microsoft was buying devs up just to destroy them. KEEP YOUR INDEPENDANCE. Sink or swim based on your team and your passion. The problem was these rich elites saw that gaming was the biggest industry on the planet and said hmm...I want that money. Ad they bullied their way into the industry and took over.

[@hododod246]

@@ItApproaches Tencent owns 30% of Larian.

[@ItApproaches]

@@hododod246 I'm aware, while I don't like that, 30% isn't enough to control them.

[@maxis2k]

In other words, medium budget games. Which is what most of the industry was for a long time. Many of the classics we look back on as some of the best games ever made in the SNES-PS2 days would be medium or less than medium budget these days. Inflation and rising costs are a problem. But the bigger issue is the companies trying to outdo each other in graphics and content. Photorealism, copying Hollywood's CGI/cinematics, hiring overpaid actors and tie ins to big name IPs, etc. They've basically taken on Hollywood's failing model. Meanwhile, something like a Dragon Quest or Souls game can be made for less than half the cost of a Final Fantasy game. And actually sell more copies. Like you said, developers need to get corp to wake up and realize this.

[@AICW]

So is it safe to say Spiderman 2 failed? Sold 11 million copies as of Q2 2024 but it had a $315 million budget.

[@KIWITALKZ]

It probably made a small profit primarily because it's Sony's own platform so they get the full sale on the digital store, as opposed to every other publisher that has to pay a 30% cut to Sony to have it on the Playstation store.

[@antoniotorres1674]

I do not think it lost money but I believe it probably did under 100 million in actual profit and for a game selling over 11 million units thay is just atrocious.

[@GustavoSilva-eb8ry]

I did not know that Pete Carroll, besides winning a Superbowl and choking another one, also in his spare time made Metroid games

[@deadringer8050]

When the industry shifted away from there loyal audiences and went chasing after the normies thats where it all fell apart. Nintendo learned this with the wii

[@samgee500]

I don't understand why you would need to hire more than one person to do the art. With all of the modern tools we have at our disposal it shouldn't be that hard.

[@mandogundam5779]

No wonder ao many games went woke and attacked their established game fans. They literally had nothing to lose, because they already lost everything. Went out like a Scooby Do villlian.

[@MrJeka1111]

Just make what real gamers want, do not overblow budgets with dei. When i worked at ubisoft they were spending budgets to some weird stuff like dei party.

[@Terranigma23]

Concord did not fail because of "DEI".

[@adam145]

All that "modern politics" and "activism" and "diversity" is there to distract you from realizing that the management did a shitty job while still earning more than you'll ever see in your life. They just want you to be mad at something that will never affect their pay or outlook for future positions.

[@argylemanni280]

@@Terranigma23 No game ever has and yet the games that have the most of it keep failing. It's just a series of weird coincidences that will keep happening through 2025 and 2026.

[@Terranigma23]

@@argylemanni280 yeah, big fail for Baldur Gate 3. 🥴

[@AICW]

@@Terranigma23 It's the exception that proves the rule. Also, BG3 hid the identitarian garbage until Act 3 which takes dozens of hours of gameplay to get to.