With several large -budget failures in recent years and a series of current layoffs in the Game Industry, when will editors be informed that this is sustainable?
I’ve been writing about the issues with massive game budgets since 2015, and yet, they remain a huge problem within the industry.
Unfortunately, large and continuous layoffs are the result of this most consecutive spending.
However, for most people outside the video game industry, it is not clear how much a game costs.
We often receive sales data for games, but we almost never see the accompanying budgets. This makes it very difficult to determine the true scope of the problem.
Obviously, studio closures and intellectual property tweaks are useful signs that sales were not enough to cover the budget, but no concrete figures are disputed.
Fortunately, in a new interview with Kiwi Talkz, Metroid Prime 2 and 3 maker Bryan Walker is refreshingly open about the true burden of big-budget games (pictured below).
The main conclusion is that a $ 100 million budget requires 6 million sales to break. Recently, the maximum of the largest games has exceeded this budget, but has slightly sold anything, with the failure of Concord and a budget of $ 400 million is remarkable.
What’s scary, at least from my point of view, having created several games, is that the $100 million budget for a game that’s ten years old. Budgets have only gotten higher since then.
Walker also points out another vital point: Those kinds of budgets are decidedly the size of Hollywood. However, it is evident that the gambling market is structured and does not absorb those prices in the same way.
In any case, games need to return to the mid-tier releases we saw during the PlayStation 2 era. The Switch is definitely helping this along, but massively expensive games need to become a thing of the past or at least become much rarer.
Follow me on X, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and am currently featured in the Giant Robots exhibition currently touring Japan.
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