An uneducated thought on the subject. Game development doesn’t cost much more today than years ago. Game companies are just spending more on game development. It’s a choice, not a requirement
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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They really did get more costly.
As the industry moved to having C-suite executives and parasite-class CEO trash who have absolutely no creativity or useful leadership capabilities involved in the business, the drain on funds and resources sky-rocketed without an iota of improvement to the games... just laundering more money from the worker-developers into the hands of executive shitstains and investor scum.
Not so much covered in this article, but the vast majority of the spending is in paying more developers, and executive pay, which is largely in stock, isn't a large contributing factor. Your favorite game from 25 years ago was probably made by 30 people in 18 months, and now the equivalent level of production value today is made by somewhere between 300 and 1500 people over a longer stretch of time.
My favourite games of today are also made by fewer than 30 people though
Yeah, that'll happen. You can't make Elden Ring or Baldur's Gate 3 with that team size though.
Not played those. You can make Factorio with that team size
There’s certainly been some industry-wide brain drain, especially when it comes to low-level engineering. When you think about the memory-level mastery people exhibited to get things running on the PlayStation 1, it feels incomparable to today.
Those people enjoyed being pioneers and recognized that was the only way to achieve their dream; but they’re also valued so highly today (picture publishers willing to buy out entire other publishers to get hold of a game engine), chances are they will never have a simple job.
Worse, some MBAs don’t even recognize their value; and wrongly believe they can be easily replaced. There’s probably some ecological comparative example where a great oak is central to the ecosystem of a whole country, and a business developer claims “We can bulldoze that for farmland and import fertilizer, right?”
some MBAs don’t even recognize
Ahhh
Sorry
Going to read it, but some early questions come to mind, like if they considered the average per-game cost, if they considered standard deviation, if they considered the average income of a developer or from a developer's country, etc.
Answering myself: seems pretty complete indeed.
Though a further question comes to mind, thanks to @Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org's meme, how do these expenses translate to profits? And further into the tangent, it could be analysed if it's a trend, or a bubble reading to burst.
It's broken down by scope of the project, into four main buckets, seemingly not by country.