this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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FF7 cost about $90M when adjusted for inflation and was one of the most expensive games to developed in it's time, but yh, yOu CaN't MaKe A gOoD gAmE fOr LeSs ThAn $300M!!!
I'll go even lower and say Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and it's one of the more remarkable entries of the series.
It took $5 Million to develop.
$5m to develop + $13.2m to market
Equivalent to about $32m in 2024. Not disagreeing, putting the value into perspective. Also consider the scale of vice city compared to your average AAA, even AA game. Games have significantly higher expectations nowadays.
Who's expectations?
Not the people playing, that's for sure.
The expectations from gamers is pretty cooked nowadays man, pay attention to the louder and larger voices on game forums, x (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, steam etc.
Hah. This thread is literally coming from some guy finding that every game should be like Elden Ring and BG3.
That's not GTA VC size, so I'm gonna say Anon's expectations, to your question.
Would most people be happy with a 2025 AAA game with the graphical fidelity of GTA:VC, though?
Personally I would love it if those massive budgets were spent where it matters, but I suspect "this game looks like it came out 20 years ago" would be a common complaint, as if only indie devs get to sacrifice photorealism for style.
I have a couple of coworkers that hate Minecraft because it's a voxel game. Whenever I tell them it's alright to not like it but there's nothing wrong with Minecraft's art choice, their response is: "No it's fucking stupid". What's weirder is that one of these guys plays a lot of retro games
You can absolutely make a fantastic game for way less than 300 million.
You can't make Baldur's Gate 3 or Elden Ring, though.
Didn't BG3 literally cost 1/3 of that to make?
Best guesses are somewhere between 100 and 200 million, if you allow me the slight hyperbole. It's unclear if marketing is included in that.
I'm going to say if you are in nine digits territory the point in my post stands very well on its own. I come from a gaming industry where we were all clutching our pearls when games first broke past 50 million budgets and felt things were unsustainable then. These days people have the gall to mention a game at least twice as expensive as "not AAA".
Calmly explaining why you can't have a good Rogue-like anymore because Balatro's budget was too high.
Casually dismissing Bloodborne and Divinity: OS as bad games, because they weren't what came after.