Why is it so expensive to make games in the United States? - gamedeveloper.com

nutcrackr

nutcrackr

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Why is it so expensive to make games in the United States?

It's becoming harder to sustainably run a game studio in the United States. What can be done to improve that?
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Interesting article from Game Developer. Basically cost of living / developer salaries in the US is insane. And remote work (not terribly efficient, devs say) also puts upward pressure on game wages instead of lower pressure, which is weird to me. Some publishers are panicking at the state of the industry and think only huge studios making mega hits and small devs will be viable.

They don't really talk about the fact that most publishers have a huge army of employees, doing everything from marketing to distribution to translation. If the publisher is releasing dozens of games a year, the overhead is not so bad. But take noobisoft and their infrequent releases and that overhead is huge per game. More studios should move away from the publisher model, but then you have a problem of marketing.
 
Triple-A and indie game studios, he said, need to "think about making smaller, better games, less expensive games, and increase the cadence of release."
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Skimming the article, I found this quote to be an interesting one. It used to be that a game development cycle took three years, from inception to release. Four years was an exceptionally long development cycle. And it used to be that 20-50 people studios were the norm for almost any game. A decade or two on, and games take twice as long with four times as many people. And while the size of the industry has gone through the roof, so has financing the whole thing, and the risks that come with that.

This may be nostalgia and selfishness talking, but I'd love to go back to the PS2/Xbox era release cadence where you'd have GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas within the same console cycle (within three years, even). Or Assassin's Creed 1 / 2 / Brotherhood / 3 on the PS3/X360 console cycle. Instead, we're currently watching the biggest developers struggle enormously to release even a single game per cycle (like GTA5 or The Last of Us).

Yes, I appreciate enormous projects and fantastic technological effort. But I'd trade the €200 million once-a-decade project of perfection for four €50 million not-perfect-still-great projects in a heartbeat, so to speak. Takes less funding, takes less time, takes fewer people, gets me more games.
 
Yeah game dev now takes an army and you see some projects blowing out to 7+ years. And if that game flops on release, it's a huge liability for the publishers and likely the beginning of the end for developers. The push for graphics and larger worlds has indeed made game development take much longer. I also think there are some management issues. Back a few years ago EA and even Noobisoft were exploring with some smaller indies that had more regular release schedules (e.g. Gone Home, Lost in Random, Unravel). In my mind it was a smart way to test the waters, keep game releases coming and maybe get a big hit or two. Doesn't seem like they're really doing it anymore? Maybe those games sold badly. Maybe they believe they know what sells and not, but it seems risky to me.
 
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