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)
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?
Halve the employees and double the salary, and you’ll be closer. Few people on a team will gross $120k, but benefits are part of that cost too.
Third the employees.
Reminder that Skyrim was made with a staff of ~300, that included revamping Gamebryo into Creation.
Devs with ~1000 devs using UE5 - what are the people even doing other than useless meetings?
Most of the personnel growth is probably in asset creation. The more realistic you want assets to look the more man hours you need to put in. Even with modern tools it is just gonna take longer to make those assets. Like instead of making a human model by directly manipulating polygons that makes it immediately game ready they first sculpt it in ZBrush then retopo to a lower polygon count to make it game ready. And then add complex facial rigs for cut scenes, high res textures etc.
It’s why companies like Sony hire these studios in China and India where hundreds of people work just making assets.
Skyrim was made two console generations ago, so I’m afraid you can’t use it as any sort of metric for how games are made today. Starfield’s team was about 100 people larger.
And taxes.
I’m not a tax expert, but I think the taxes are applied after gross. Taxes on money coming in, not going out. So that ~$120k is what the company spends, but it’s not what the employee sees.
Sorry that I was not more clear. The company is paying the employee 120k gross, yes, but then also paying other things behind the scenes like other taxes and unemployment insurance, etc.
Yup. If you’re not an independent contractor, your employer has to match the amount you pay in income taxes.
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.
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.
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.