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With multiple big-budget fiascos and layoffs across the gaming industry in recent years, when will publishers realize this isn’t sustainable?
I’ve been writing about the issue of large game budgets since 2015, and they remain a huge issue within the industry.
The massive layoffs currently underway are sadly the result of this extraordinary amount of overspending.
But for most people outside the gaming industry, it’s not clear how much it actually costs to make a game.
We often receive game sales data, but we almost never see the budget associated with it. This makes it very difficult to determine the true extent of the problem.
Studio closures and IP ownership changes are obviously useful indicators that sales weren’t enough to cover the budget, but hard numbers aren’t often discussed.
Thankfully, in a new interview with Kiwi Talkz, he says: metroid prime 2 and 3 Producer Brian Walker was refreshingly open about the actual cost of the big-budget game (see below).
The main takeaway is that a $100 million budget requires 6 million sales to break even. These days, most of the big games are way over their budget, yet sell almost nothing. Concord’s It was reported to be a failure, with a notable budget of $400 million.
The scary thing, at least from my perspective as someone who has made a lot of different games, is that 10 years ago we had a $100 million budget for a game. Since then, the budget has only increased.
Walker also makes another notable point: This kind of budget is clearly Hollywood-sized. However, it is clear that the gaming market is structured differently and will not absorb these costs in the same way.
Either way, the game needs to go back to the mid-level releases seen in the PlayStation 2 era. The Switch definitely contributes to this, but extremely expensive games need to become a thing of the past, or at least much rarer.
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