Why game devlopment is expensive

[Blackhart98]

Hello, how come game development is such an expensive task? I am always shocked to hear about these multimillon dollars game budgets . Can someone talk me step by step into game creating. I might end up developing video games in the future so it's good to know. I just don't understand is it the engine that cost all the money ,or is it just the high end laptops.

[Ceset]

Game development takes a lot of time, from 3 months to 2 years.

For a big company, there works 50-100 people and even more there are other small studios that are tasked with small jobs. Also sometimes you pay for the rights of what you use in your game(Dead Island 2 paid for using California, paid A LOT).

All these people have a salary(3000-10000$ not sure though) and all the small companies takes some money.

Then some games pay for animations and movie making which involves human actors. Then there are sound actors...

You got the picture i guess. Here is a link for some games' costs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

EDIT: There is also marketing costs

[Z e r e o]

For a big company, there works 50-100 people

Actually for the larger AAA games and studios there is quite a bit more people working on it then that. It is not that uncommon for there to be around 1,000 people (Red Dead Redemption had around 800) working on the game throughout it's creation. These range from programmers, artists, sound artists, Q&A, management, executives, etc.

The lowest paid of all those listed is probably the Q&A department but they still make quite decent salaries ($18,000 - $50,000 though usually in the middle). Whereas senior programmers, management, artist and executives tend to make quite a bit more.

That is just the salary side of things (For a single year also, which Ceset mentioned a lot take more then a year to complete).

Then there is publisher and or marketing costs which can cost millions for larger games. Then as Ceset mentioned they also have to pay for other things like voice actors, motion capture time if they don't have one in studio, equipment fees (Servers for example), middle ware royalties and a whole range of other things.

To put it plainly big titles for games are basically the same as motion pictures now days and their expenses are quite similar.

[Ceset]

@Z e r e o i didn't know, that many people works on AAA games :O

Another example for motion capture is Hell Blade's trailer. Just the trailer costed more than 100k$ and 8 weeks time(they didn't even used a professional actor, just one of their employees, an artist i guess)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTcrm-auq8Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzx8a1yyQ30

[twiggystardust]

It is possible to make games for absolutely no cost at all. I have a game which I am developing and everything in it was created by me(art, code, music, etc.) I guess you do need to be a bit multi-talented to do everything yourself. I'm not saying my game is or is going to be AAA quality, but the way I see it, if you have fun then nothing else really matters.

[Lachlan Easton]

It is possible to make games for absolutely no cost at all.

Working yourself is not free, you need to eat etc. Remember, time is money.
If you spend 500 hours working on a game then you want to be able to make back 500 hours worth of pay. If you're just making toys for a hobby then that's simply how you spend your time, but if you're working on a project with the intention of shipping it you should have some kind of budget. Part of said budget should be the number of hours you can invest.

[chrisname]

Most AAA games spend a huge portion of those multimillion dollar budgets on marketing, not development. GTA V's total budget was about $265M and "an analyst"* claims more than $137M went on development, which means GTA V's marketing budget was about $128M.

* http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-02-01-gta-v-dev-costs-over-USD137-million-says-analyst