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Comment by chriswalz | Hacker News Reader

I found it weird how the video doesn’t account for the massive economies of scale that AAA companies have access to. The audiences & market size are way bigger now than they were back in the day.

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Our own marketing department made a good summary of this( I work for a AAA games company) - according to them as little as 10 years ago there was maybe a dozen big, AAA, 50h+ long releases each year. Now there’s 100+ a year and increasing. Yes your markets are bigger, but there’s more competition and fundamentally it’s still winner takes all - big names sell 20/30/40 million units, while if the game isn’t either a big well known franchise or an absolute 10/10 hit it struggles to pay for its own development cost.

And the length of games plays big part too - my wife took 100h to complete Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and there’s still tonnes to do, it just meant that she wasn’t ready to buy another big AAA game for like 3-4 months.

>according to them as little as 10 years ago there was maybe a dozen big, AAA, 50h+ long releases each year. Now there’s 100+ a year and increasing.

What's the criteria for "AAA"? 100+ AAA releases per year seems a bit on the high side.

There's a bit of handwaving and the the video admits $90 is just a gut estimate.

However, I think they did try to account for things like that: they started with an estimate games should cost $225-$300 before accounting for larger audience size.

Larger market size and efficiencies like reusable game engines are balanced by increased productions costs. The first versions of Final Fantasy just had text captions in 2D. Now they are in full 3D with fully acted voice actors.

Starts here: https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8?t=96

> I found it weird how the video doesn’t account for the massive economies

because it's a bad video made by someone who understands nothing about economics.

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