Video games are not too expensive to make

How did he assume that? His post talks about development costs; market size has nothing to do with the costs, except in the sense that a bigger market lets you approve a plan with larger costs.

Exploitation of workers happens in all industries that provide entertainment.

Source: lighting technician on Film and TV for 10 years

God forbid the gaming nerds made a Union and stopped putting up with this shit.

Not that it will change much, but when they rape your ass, they have to pay for the privilege.

/facepalm

Oh good god. More incomplete logic. Logic that only goes as far you want it to go, and no further.

The market, by growing in size, will pay for your growing teams in spades.

But keep on arguing these points man. They matter. You're fighting the good fight.

That is correct, and is just one of the many things which corrupts his analysis.

You need to put numbers on that to actually have the argument.

And remember, I'm not actually taking a position on the substance here. I just thought your response to river82 was lame.

Well, there is undoubtedly a bigger market for games than there was 20 years ago, but that's in part driven by necessity. The hunt for better graphics, voice acting, cinematics, 4k resolution, VR, and the inclusion of "awesome buttons" () has meant that Publishers need to aggressively market the game to the widest possible audience in order to recoup costs and bring in large wads of dosh to fund the next wallet-breaking adventure. King and Supercell combines spent close to a billion dollars marketing their games in 2014 and they just do piddly social games. AAA publishers sometimes spend over a hundred million dollars marketing a single title. The lower cost of the game, the fewer people need to buy that game and the less marketing you need. Real low cost games can just survive by word of mouth.

Let's say EA makes 700 million dollars net income. That may sound like a lot of money whereas in reality that will fully fund and market 3-4 top quality games. WOOOOW, that's a lot of games right? Now imagine if 2 of those fail or get cancelled 2 years into development (which isn't a rare practice.)

AAA gaming is incredibly high risk, and people have been warning for many years now that consumers will start to bear the cost of some of that risk. Of course they can just whack out Madden every year and 3 more Sims expansion for some surefire dosh but still ... The scummy practices (like yearly sport games and high priced expansions) will help fund the high risk games. Take Activision for example, a lot of their income comes from World of Warcraft (which can die in a fire) but the profit of that game probably helped fund Destiny, which cost well over 100 million dollars to fully develop. Remember when Activision's boss came out and said they were spending half a billion dollars on developing and marketing the Destiny franchise (the whole franchise not just the first game)? That's a lot of money and Activision hopes it will help sure up falling revenue. Awesome right? But what happens if it had failed? Those are incredibly high stakes they're gambling with.

Gamers, and youtube personnel that like to spout edgy theories for clicks and money, have a limited understanding of how things actually work. Also the market realities of gaming have all but eradicated the AA game industry, (or the people sitting just below AAA.) Too much cost for too little reward, they can't survive.

It wouldn't be so bad if publishers could get most of the money from disc sales, but they can't. With your average video game, of the 50 or 60 dollars you pay for that game some of the money goes to retailer mark up, some goes to distribution costs, then you have platform royalties (Microsoft and Sony take a percentage of the pie if you release on console,) and any costs of returns. Then you have taxes which must be paid. Then you need to take into consideration that not everybody buys the game at full price (sales). Even digital sales on Steam require a fair percentage to go to Valve.

So a lot of people think if a game sells 1 million copies, well 1 million * 60 = tons of money but that's nowhere close to being true. In fact Zach Wilson, ex dev of Visceral, he said Dead Space 2 took 60 million dollars to make, sold 4 million copies, and underperformed. And you just sit there and think ... nah, this just isn't sustainable xD


 

(twitter image nicked from Neogaf forums)

I stopped reading at this point.

That's fine, if you wanna live in fantasy land, so be it.   

Whether it's a million or a trillion dollar budget game, it would still not satisfy gamers who think the game would have been better if something was included or another was excluded.

Do we have any actual verification on 40 million budget? I find it very hard to believe that Bethesda and CDPR manage to hit +70 mark( with marketing included), while BW doesn't with number of employees working on project, production values, MP, amount of voice acting, etc, etc... with overall production extending over nearly 5 years.

I think that the $40 million budget doesn't include marketing, and I'm going to point out that Montreal has a lot of tax incentives for game design going one, so that could have made it much cheaper to hire devs. If I remember correctly in Jason Schrier's Visceral Shuts down article, he stated that it cost $16,000 per month per dev in California compared to $10,000 in Montreal or Austin. I think there where roughly 80 devs in Montreal so thats roughly 9.6 million dollar per year. So for 5 years, it's $48 million, though that would be assuming that they had a full dev team of 80 people for the full 5 years, which is unlikely as they would have had a pre-production period with a lot less staff. So I would argue a $40 million budget sounds about right?

So since that includes marketing which is usually the same cost as development, it would come to about $40 million US to just develop the game. I think however the tax breaks probably really helped keep cost down a lot, as I think they actually created more jobs in Montreal in EA Motive as well as keeping the jobs from BioWare Montreal (by absorbing them into EA Motive).