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> On a AAA game, you can afford to hire a couple of medievalists and get these details correct.

The financing of AAA titles is actually rather tight; the fact that AAA titles hardly ever do experiments in gameplay and the fact that in many studios crunch time happens show how tight the financial planning of AAA titles has to be to work out.

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This is not because the publishers can't afford to spend a bit more. But because they would rather capture every last dollar of profit.

There's an argument to be made that getting some of these details right would improve their profitability. For sure people will be talking about the strange pigs wandering around outside the villages.

I would love to know what percentage of that budget has anything to do with development vs advertising. I see ads for games on buses, billboards, tv commercials, etc that do not seem cheap.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... for a list of estimated development and marketing costs for various AAA games.

A lot of the marketing happens post launch and is thus low risk as you can adjust the budget based on sales performance. The same isn’t true for game development itself, which must be limited to a fixed budget based on anticipated future sales.

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