I would like to see why Overwatch is so expensive. They don’t have some cutting-edge tech, it could have been a Quake or Half-Life mod and have the same exact gameplay and marginally worse graphics. Ok, there is the networking and matchmaking.
Ok, they need anti-cheat and perfected loot box drop probabilities.
Still, free to play South Korean shooters achieve that for way less.
You have too narrow a view which seems pigeonholed on technology. The majority of expense is rarely the technical line item or budget unless it’s a pure SaaS or PaaS in the cloud play. The expense is often from headcount, marketing, sales, creative, support, legal, esport, and operational costs. You can make an AAA clone but that won’t make it Overwatch or WoW. Their brand carried them and even back in the day their cinematic trailers carried the hype.
Right, I’ve concentrated on actually making the game instead of the whole business cycle.
I would expect that a small developer would spend less on GR, PR and so on.
