baatliwalaMar 26

[Jason Schreier] AAA game budgets estimated around $300 million. These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock)

https://lemmy.world/post/44758205

[Jason Schreier] AAA game budgets estimated around $300 million. These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock) - Lemmy.World

Full post: Exact budgets of video-game productions can be tough to corroborate (more transparency from publishers would be nice!) 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 To address some frequently asked questions: - These are US and Canada productions. If you’re wondering why game X cost so much less, it was probably made elsewhere - These budgets are almost entirely dev salaries + overheard and have nothing to do with executive compensation (which is mostly stock)

Show threadabsquatulateMar 26
300 million would kinda make sense, as it would mean an avg of 60k/year for a five year production on a 1000 people team. But how many AAA games are actually that large?
Show threadjonathan

They’re not a consistent size over the life of a project. They also contract out a lot of stuff later on to avoid ramping the team up too much.

Look at Epic games, ~5k staff before the recent layoff. The games they developed over the past 10+ years aren’t even AAA production levels.

Mar 26 at 12:14pmWeb
Show threadMurrayLMar 26
Epic isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison with most other studios. They don’t just make games, they develop and support Unreal Engine for both games and film production, they operate EGS, a motion capture studio, ArtStation, Sketchfab, and a dozen other subsidiaries. It’s a huge company.
Show threadKatana314Mar 27
Expanding the team, by contracting or whatever approach they want, is the big mistake that leads a lot of these projects into hell. It draws time away from the core team, by both managing the contractors, and correcting the hundreds of artistic mistakes the contractors are doing. Most historically classic games I enjoyed came from a relatively small team.