With multiple big-budget flops in recent years and an ongoing spate of layoffs across the games industry, when will publishers learn that this is not sustainable?
I’ve been writing about the issues with massive game budgets since 2015, and yet, they remain a huge problem within the industry.
The ongoing and extensive layoffs are sadly the fallout of this insane amount of overspending.
However, for most people outside the games industry, it’s not clear how much games cost to actually make.
We often receive sales data for games, but we almost never see the accompanying budgets. This makes it very difficult to determine the true scope of the problem.
Obviously, studio closures and IP ownership changes are helpful indicators that the sales weren’t enough to cover the budget, but hard numbers are not often discussed.
Thankfully, in a new interview with Kiwi Talkz, Metroid Prime 2 and 3 producer Bryan Walker was refreshingly open about the true cost of big-budget games (shown below).
The main takeaway is that a $100 million budget requires 6 million sales to break even. Recently, most of the bigger games have far exceeded that budget but have barely sold anything, with Concord’s failure and reported $400 million budget being notable.
The scary thing, at least from my perspective, having made various games, is that the $100 million budget for a game was where we were ten years ago. Budgets have only increased since then.
Walker also makes another salient point that these types of budgets are decidedly Hollywood-esque in size. However, it’s clear that the gaming market is structured differently and doesn’t absorb those costs in the same way.
In any case, games need to return to the mid-tier releases we saw during the PlayStation 2 era. The Switch is definitely helping this along, but massively expensive games need to become a thing of the past or at least become much rarer.
Follow me on X, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and am currently featured in the Giant Robots exhibition currently touring Japan.
