Why video games are so expensive to develop

economist.com

13 points·brendannee··4 comments

TL;DR: because you need professionals for modern CG and programming, professionals deserve good pay and you need a lot of them, also considerable marketing is required for non-innovative games.

They deserve it, but I've heard some rumors that game programmers are pushed to their limits with deadlines and cuts.

I've got a feeling marketing is eating up most of the budget for all AAA titles. I can understand seeing how consumers seem to love the hype train. Does anybody have a clue on the actual size of marketing in big productions? I couldn't find any facts.

From a 2009 article, "EA now typically spends two or three times as much on marketing and advertising as it does on developing a game." http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/26/eas-chief-creative-officer...

And there's some random numbers throughout history in this article, such as Modern Warfare 2 costing $40 to $50 milion to develop and a total launch cost of $200 million. http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-...

And yes game dev is a lot of hours for less pay than your fantastic Silicon Valley wages.

The real reasons are management overhead and big corporations viewing all developers as equivalent, expendable resources even though it leads to subpar work, extended deadlines and constant industry burnouts. Technology getting more complicated is a poor excuse for the AAA game industry's gross incompetence in mismanaged funding.

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