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[PeteBull]

Useless overpaid parasites in western studios demanding top salaries yet producing utter garbage of products, publishers better smarten up and use more asian/eastern europe devs instead, quality will be higher and dev budgets of the games will be substantially lower, win win situation for gaming industry

 

[Topher]

Sony doesn't have the balls to cut off Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio.

Then they will cut them off for simply costing to much to keep around. People and companies are fleeing California for a very specific reason: it costs too much to live there. They have to make a choice.

 

[Bridges]

Do games actually need to be as big as they are? I feel dumb sometimes with this stuff because I know there are definitely "rising development costs" but aside from salaries why is it more expensive to make a game now than it was for the 360? Is it that expectations are so high that they have to push the envelope graphically?

If someone came out with one of the most fun games of the year but it visually looked like it was from 2009 would it actually be a big deal? Indie devs are making SNES and PS1 games that go viral all the time. Naughty Dog I can understand would get roasted because they've set that expectation for themselves but for the health of the industry could we stop chasing photorealism and 60+ hour stories to cut down on the amount of staff and make this sustainable again?

 

[lughnasadh123]

You don't have to leave the US to find many, many cheaper places to start a business at. The challenge is probably finding new but talented people to move there to work for less than the bigger cities.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

Salaries aside, a game like Crimson Desert has been made by less than 300 devs.

Its absolutely unacceptable that western devs need twice or thrice as many to make a game of similar scope. Flatout ridiculous.

It's not a tech problem, for fucks sake. Stop buying these cheap excuses from establishment people.

 

[StereoVsn]

The cost of the employee is more than just the salary, you know.

Yeah, benefits (401K, medical and dental insurance, etc) can be easily 50% of salary or more. Throw in office space cost for employee on top of that.

Like my small office in a vanilla office building on outskirts of DC in Virginia (not talking K street, Arlington, or Georgetown) is charged around $40K a year. A cubicle will be 1/3 of that, give or take.

 

[Darkmakaimura]

5K a month? WTF?!

So I heard, you can supposedly get a studio in the city for around $1600.

 

[RedC]

---

People.

Modern game budgets are overwhelmingly:

• salaries
• benefits
• overhead
• employment costs
• office costs tied to employees

In other words:

AAA budgets are largely labor budgets.

---

That is a location problem more than anything else. The other stuff you mention are certainly factors, but not "bigger" than this.

I'm not going to argue that labor is a minor factor. It is the core cost driver.

Where I would slightly push back is saying it is location "more than anything else."

Location multiplies the cost, but scope creates the headcount in the first place.

If a game needs 1,000-plus people, five years of production, massive art pipelines, cinematics, animation, mocap, QA, localization, live-service infrastructure, patches, optimization, and marketing coordination, then the budget is going to be huge anywhere. Cheaper regions lower the burn rate, but they do not magically make a bloated AAA project lean.

So a better argument would be:

AAA budgets are largely labor budgets, and labor budgets are heavily affected by location.

I agree with that.

But location is not the only disease. It is the gasoline. The fire is the modern AAA production model: huge teams, long timelines, insane asset demands, too many managers, too much rework, and games scoped like they need to dominate the entire market.

Move the studio somewhere cheaper and you reduce the burn.

Build the game with half the people, half the wasted meetings, tighter scope, stronger leadership, and fewer years of churn, and now you are actually fixing the machine.

 

[kiphalfton]

$240,000 per year is a comfortable middle-class wage in San Francisco and Seattle?!?!

That's insane! How do people live there that work in bars, shops, hotels etc?

When I lived in Portland, which is cheaper than Seattle, people had roommates (usually several).

 

[simpatico]

So studios choose to always open in the most expensive cities in the world, in order to make use of the least productive employees in the world, and then overpay said employees by tens of thousands more than if they had simply opened their studio in a cheaper city, thus saving on overhead from....well.... pretty much every segment of the business imaginable.

Just imagine 1,200 of those salaries walking in and out of Bungie every day during the Marathon development. Hell you've still got hundreds doing it for Fairgame$. Better get on that one Hermy! PS+ is going to cost $139.99/month before Herm is done unless someone stops him.

 

[666]

feet pics

 

[Topher]

I'm not going to argue that labor is a minor factor. It is the core cost driver.

Where I would slightly push back is saying it is location "more than anything else."

Location multiplies the cost, but scope creates the headcount in the first place.

If a game needs 1,000-plus people, five years of production, massive art pipelines, cinematics, animation, mocap, QA, localization, live-service infrastructure, patches, optimization, and marketing coordination, then the budget is going to be huge anywhere. Cheaper regions lower the burn rate, but they do not magically make a bloated AAA project lean.

So a better argument would be:

AAA budgets are largely labor budgets, and labor budgets are heavily affected by location.

I agree with that.

But location is not the only disease. It is the gasoline. The fire is the modern AAA production model: huge teams, long timelines, insane asset demands, too many managers, too much rework, and games scoped like they need to dominate the entire market.

Move the studio somewhere cheaper and you reduce the burn.

Build the game with half the people, half the wasted meetings, tighter scope, stronger leadership, and fewer years of churn, and now you are actually fixing the machine.

Ok....I can see your point there. Scopes are out of hand. Scale back there and the number of employees needed also decrease.

 

[kiphalfton]

Start outsourcing to China or eastern Europe, they can do more with less. Get rid of DEI departments and stop using consultants that add nothing to game quality.

Those departments are usually middle management adjacent. Which as a whole is a group of circle jerkers.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Main reason why making games costs so much is simply because there's too much money floating around.

Corporations greenlighting overpriced duds and you got your share of investment companies swooping in with their bag of money like somehow on Earth studios that made Mindseye and Splitgate 2 are worth $100M investor's budgets.

I dont get a sense last gen or any other gen before that you had too many $100M+ games. Maybe some like Rockstar games or a handful of other big budget games that sell great. But now you get big money for studios with zero where someone is waving money in their faces gambling it's the next Fortnite or COD. As a recent example, how the hell does Saros get greenlit for a $76M budget?

If you cut off the bags of money, you cut off overzealous budgeted games.

 

[Haint]

What exactly did 1000+ people do making 3 small maps in a copy pasta extraction shooter with no cutscenes, mocap, or story whatsoever that looks like a high end phone game? What was each persons individual 1/1000th contribution to something that could and should have been made by 20-50 people? How many Sweetbaby Femenist Frequency consultants did they pay millions of dollars to to non-binary the transgender robots?

That's where the waste is you insufferable fat fuck who has endlessly lobbied for videogame unionization, even higher salaries for these worthless dregs, and launched anti-crunch crusades for 1% earners working the cushiest jobs in the highest ivory towers in all of human history.

This man is so stuffed full of horse shit it's coming out of his ears.

 

[Deerock71]

That summary needs a summary.

 

[Kikorin]

And yet a couple of nerds (sometimes just a single nerd) in their rooms create games that costs bags of chips to make and sells millions, just because prefer to concentrate on making something fun for them and other nerds instead of whatever AAA western studios are making.

 

[calico]

A game which requires 1000 employees in a DEI-based-hiring country would not necessarily require 1000 employees in a merit-based-hiring country.

It's a culture issue as much as an average salary issue.