

Why video games are so expensive to develop - brendannee
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/09/economist-explains-15

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CmonDev
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.

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rrmoelker
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.

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CliffyA
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...](http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/26/eas-chief-creative-officer-
describes-game-industrys-re-engineering/)

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-...](http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-
game-1501413649)

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

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markblitz
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.

