Are games becoming too expensive to make?

[charlesr]

AAA MP games now come with the expectation of "seasons", with new maps and features. But Battlefield 2042 couldn't even release with a decent game, let alone fix things and they now appear to have canned support. Overwatch 2 looks to be the same game with new characters. And Halo Infinite seems to be taking infinite time to release new maps.

In the age of Doom, I could whip up a new map in an afternoon. But now, the coding required seems to be immense, with patches in the GB size. Writing / creating all that must be hard work.

Where's it all going to end?

[Asura]

To be fair, with many of those big projects, a huge amount of the budget goes on marketing - getting the word out. That's a huge drain on the industry that can't really be avoided, even if the games were cheaper to make.

[nonny]

I think cost wasn't any of the problems associated with Battlefield 2042... and there were clearly many.

I don't know whether DICE are just technically brilliant but unrealistic and try to include too much, or whether their EA overlords push for too much in too little time... or various combinations in-between.

What I do know is all DICE have had to do for a win is release a remake or remaster of Bad Company 2 with new tech and be done with it.

All we've had since BF3 are buggy launches and more and more features no-one asked for.

As for the state of play in general, yes triple AAA games are expensive and risky. Are they too expensive? Well they're hugely profitable when done right and some teams seem to be able to do that consistently... so there's some value and art to the process.

We are seeing more complex games these days but equally I find myself enjoying far more smaller indie games. Plus the tech is improving all the time, like Unreal 5 etc... making the tools easier is half the battle to releasing great looking games at lower cost/timeframes.

So I'll say no, they're not too expensive... but they are very risky at the top end and not every studio should aim so high.

[Cepp]

Depends on the type of game you're making I suppose. For GAAS games it just seems like there's a massive risk/rewards aspect to it, the potential returns if you get it right are so huge that most publishers can't resist.

On the plus side the industry is so diverse now, we're spoilt for choice. A game like Baldur's Gate III can exist and seems like it's going to do very well for example.

[fishbowlhead]

There certainly getting expensive to make, however I believe in a lot of games most of this is wasted on miss management. Look at something like Halo Infinite, nearly 8 years of active development for what? An open world map with some enemies and missions dotted around. What did they all spend the other 7.5 years doing exactly? Honestly what?

Then look at hyper efficient studios like Insomniac, everyone knows their job, things are set in stone with a clear plan for everyone to follow and get on with, beginning, middle, end, game out.

That’s over simplifying thing’s obviously, but even still, there seems to be a gigantic waste of time on a lot of games that could be eliminated with good project management.

On the other side we have more small devs than ever thanks to online distribution on all platforms, so its not all bad, you have to be efficient and trim when in a small team.

[nonny]

That's a bit of a skewed comparison althoughI totally agree Halo Infinite was clearly in development hell.

That title has involved creating a brand new scalable game engine that works across multiple platforms, a GaaS multiplayer and an open world campaign on top... it's no wonder it took so long (and still isn't finished) but equally you can understand how they crumbled under the sheer weight of it all.

Insomniac have made Spiderman based on a lot of tech they gleaned from Sunset Overdrive, a sequel built on top of the same engine and a new Ratchet & Clank solo title specific to PS5. All have been stellar and they clearly know how manage their projects but those are completely different prospects.

If I had to pick a title for comparison I think Horizon Zero Dawn is a better one. First party, built on their new engine (Decima) after Killzone Shadowfall and there was what? 4-5 years between those games? Cost wise they wouldn't have scaled up a big or early as with Halo but clearly it took a lot to bring that project to release... and again that was a solo campaign, though open world.

[Brad]

I’d put it down to the studio or their overlords being too large and interfering.

If the halo guys couldn’t make their own engine they should have used someone else’s. I’m not blaming the 343 devs but there’s no reason for that game to have ended up how it did without wasting tons and tons of effort. Some teams know how to work better than others, and are allowed to. Take kojima; given endless cash they made a new engine for mgs4 and then another one for mgs5, multi platform, that did everything he wanted. Fast forward to not having endless cash and he just used Guerilla’s engine. Maybe had to restrict scope but got the game out in good condition.

Large Game companies are no different from other large companies. Trying to cut costs and maximise profit. Any effort at making the best game they can has long gone. It’s only about the money. Luckily there is choice out there so stop buying garbage and buy good stuff instead. If a game has a massive marketing budget it’s because it can’t stand up on its own.

[huxley]

Are studio owners / publishers just not inflating costs of producing games to get taxation cuts? Much like movies studios. I recall reading some pretty successful movies have made some catastrophic losses on paper.
Still an expensive process all the same

[Dogg Thang]

Are studio owners / publishers just not inflating costs of producing games to get taxation cuts? Much like movies studios. I recall reading some pretty successful movies have made some catastrophic losses on paper.
Still an expensive process all the same

Yep, I don’t know a lot about game financing but if it does work like film financing then, yes, you may well see losses all over the place even if something took in a lot of money. But your last point is what’s important there. Ultimately they can still be incredibly expensive to make. And this does seem to have been an issue for a while because the problem of low sales often seems to not actually be low sales but unreasonable expectations. Some games can make a fortune but it’s still just not enough. The interest is there, the audience is there, the money is there. But the cost of making and promoting the game meant the profit just wasn’t quite big enough for whoever was deciding how much money is enough money.

And as already mentioned in this thread, there are no end of reasons why games can cost too much, from mismanagement all the way to just they cost that much. The film comparison always interests me because we call it film production, and that’s accurate. Every aspect is creative, has room for artistry, ideas, experiments but it is ultimately production and you can say from a script or storyboard how long things will take and how much it will cost and be pretty accurate. In film, development is the part you do before production - it’s coming up with those ideas, figuring out what it might be. Development may not be fixed but it’s doesn’t have to be expensive. In games, it’s all development. It’s like every game is made with nobody knowing how things should work or how much it will cost. Everything seems to be a moving target. And as an outsider looking at an industry that is now very well established (and let’s be honest, the nature of games has not changed all that much in around 15 years even as looks got better), it seems nuts that the processes are not yet locked down and predictable.

As Brad says, companies can use an engine that already works rather than creating their own. It’s like a film company inventing cameras each time. It just feels like, at this stage, game development should mostly not be game development. It should be game production.

[Asura]

As Brad says, companies can use an engine that already works rather than creating their own. It’s like a film company inventing cameras each time. It just feels like, at this stage, game development should mostly not be game development. It should be game production.

That can cause problems though. If a company builds a brand upon something they don't own, like an engine, they can be in real trouble down the line if the situation changes.

There are plenty of examples, but one that's kinda known (though not often talked about these days) is with Renderware.

When EA bought Criterion, many people commented it was weird that EA, who owned Need for Speed would buy the developers of Burnout. They said it was for their tech & experience, and that's wasn't a lie... But Criterion made Renderware, which was kinda the Unity of its day (a low-cost multiplatform engine which made it easier than ever before to release a game on multiple consoles). When EA bought Criterion, they didn't immediately revoke everyone's use of Renderware, but it was clear that the future of the engine lay within EA itself and if you were using it, you had to move to something else, and if you were at a certain point of development, you might have to throw away a reasonably large amount of work and start from scratch.

A number of developers had titles and brands which were built in Renderware. They still released games uninterrupted, but the Renderware projects were usually in "dead man walking" mode while they had to work furiously to create something new from scratch.

Even when developers switch engines, it can create a huge amount of work even if they have the sort of game which would make that more straightforward; I mean look at Kingdom Hearts 3.

I can't give specific names but I'm aware of several developers for whom the Renderware thing caused serious trouble, and in some cases vowed they'd never use an off-the-shelf engine again.

Now, in the modern day, it's a bit different. Years ago there was a persistent rumour that Disney were going to buy Unity; I honestly have no idea where that rumour started, but it was something I heard. But with Unreal, Epic are so big now that realistically, I don't think anyone could buy them, and even if they do, too much of Epic's wealth is based upon people using their engine - so it wouldn't really make sense. But the terms by which you pay them are ultimately up to Epic, which creates a power imbalance; this is why companies like Squaresoft are only relatively recently starting to use it instead of their own.

I guess what I'm saying is it can seem weird that so many games reinvent the wheel, and truly, sometimes it's just hubris or stubbornness, but there are at least some legitimate reasons for it.

[Dogg Thang]

That pretty much backs up what I’m saying. Maybe the games publishers and the means to make games shouldn’t be owned by the same people. Shouldn’t be so tied together - which kind of happened because it was normal for game devs to make the tools with which they would make those games - and with enough conflicts or problems that game devs will still approach certain things from scratch. While proprietary software is common everywhere, it’s all too tied together in games and there still seems to be way too much reinventing the wheel even now when engines like Unity are common. Of course, that’s an outsider view and there will be so much I do know but it really feels like, after this many years of making games, the industry’s lack of certainty in its own creation processes is a fundamental flaw.

[eastyy]

Tbh I get the impression yes and no....No in that I see especially indie developers coming up with some very very impressive stuff with such a small team like Valheim for example.

But yes in the way where i see games being over bloated and especially it seems like poor management and planning is ballooning the cost of games (there are many many examples but Anthem/Fallout 76/Cyberpunk 2077 come to mind)

[Asura]

That pretty much backs up what I’m saying. Maybe the games publishers and the means to make games shouldn’t be owned by the same people. Shouldn’t be so tied together - which kind of happened because it was normal for game devs to make the tools with which they would make those games - and with enough conflicts or problems that game devs will still approach certain things from scratch. While proprietary software is common everywhere, it’s all too tied together in games and there still seems to be way too much reinventing the wheel even now when engines like Unity are common. Of course, that’s an outsider view and there will be so much I do know but it really feels like, after this many years of making games, the industry’s lack of certainty in its own creation processes is a fundamental flaw.

Oh absolutely.

I'll tentatively step on your toes with a TV/movie metaphor the BBC don't fabricate camera lenses.

There have been papers written which suggest that the games industry is similar to "the studio system" of Hollywood; not literally from a structural perspective but rather that it's a young industry which has yet to fully establish itself into its "final" form. Those people will have a field-day by 2025, what with how much of the games industry moved to work-from-home during the pandemic and is considering staying there, because it offers so many perceived advantages... But it's also been suggested it's going to lead to big problems further down the line.

I suspect in the next few years you're going to see, among others, Ubisoft fail. Really big firms. We're not going to see a "crash" per se but rather those bigger companies will break up, because the industry is headed into an interesting space. Some parts are gravitating to services with open arms while other developers are very concerned about it. Microsoft is gradually making the Xbox not so much a console but rather a service, while Sony has been slower to make that jump, and arguably isn't as committed to it. But on the other end, the last decade has cast doubt on whether "the Netflix model" is something to emulate; the customer loves it, but that only works if it makes enough money to fund the creation of new products.

[Neon Ignition]

Most games companies have massively lost perspective in terms of projects. It's been moving more and more to a divide between indie scale and AAA scale projects for years and the loss of AA titles has created a chasm in the market for affordably budgeted but much more regularly released titles. Much like many calling for Ridge Racer 8, it wouldn't need to be a big benchmark title, just well budgeted and priced and you could make a nice little earner out of the series again much like Asphalt has etc. MS can spend years and multi-millions making Forza Motorsport 9 but I'd probably get more from a fairly unambitious and not too highly budgeted Blur 2 followed by a Blast Corps 2 etc. Variety and budget management, win for all.

[nonny]

Stop it, I'd love a sequel to Blur (or even BC support) but it's never going to happen