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)
To be honest I don’t remember the exact details about the situation, just the huge amount that was spent on it. If I remember rightly they scrapped the engine at some point and started over or something along those lines but take that with a grain of salt because it’s been so long since I looked into it at all.
yeah that sounds like lumberyard, their reskinning of the cryengine they bought from crytek.
went to a few presentations on this with our local IGDA chapter, it was huge, slow and bloated.