this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Sure, if you want to only talk about AAA games, yeah, the cost is going up. But in general, cost has gone down.
I'm not only talking about AAA. I'm pointing out some of the things you missed in your assessment.
Like I said, even indie studios today spend more to make their non-sprite, full featured games than studios did making NES games. And then those indie games sell for $20 or $30 instead of the full $60 price point. So the content-to-development cost ratio is still shit
Unless you only one scrappy in the games made by three person dev team they really haven’t. The cost for making a game that was good in 2015 has gone down, sure. But it behooves you to show that game development in general, and yes that includes indie developers, has gone down.
A 10 person dev team in any major city is going to cost you between $500,000 and $1mill a year just to staff.