Mastodawn

[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)

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absquatulate Mar 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?

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jonathan Mar 26

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.

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MurrayL

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.