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The sheer costs of making video games Anonymous 08/29/2024 (Thu) 01:20:22 Id: e94f92 No. 1006784
/v/ with the recent Concord/Dustborn and other AAA flops this year. I thought a dedicated thread talking about gAAAy spending GDPs of small countries, would be necessary. I'm interested in investigating just how much of this is money laundering, or sheer incompetence.
>>1006784 I've been seeing insane justifications by Sony shills that 5 year dev cycles with hundreds of millions of dollars for the budget, is "sustainable" with nothing in-between. Because these same brain dead faggots seem to think a Marvel movie making billions will carry the entire flailing movie industry.
My bet with concord debacle costing 200 mill is similar to how sega's hyenas +100 mill fuck up. 8 years of constantly throwing out developed assets and starting from scratch again, while paying 200ish people +50k saleries is going to add up.
>>1006795 >>1006797 Then you have shit like Shekel Yidzen which is nearly a billion.
>>1006798 The biggest cost is always going to be salaries, ie paying people, 2nd cost is marketing. The more you spend making a game or the more people you bring on to make game the more it's going to cost. Doing some napkin math on star citizen 2022 financial report the total salaries cost is over 300 million. Add another 2 years with same staff cost (assuming they're not downsizing like the rest of the industry is) and they pissed away another 100 million down the hole on just paying people.
80% money laundering 15% marketing 5% development
>>1006808 For a game that's still not out.
Checklists, both in people and in features (enough items to collect to make DK64 look lean, crafting for sake of crafting, distinct vehicle types to control, LGBTBBQGRIDS+ representation). >>1006808 I really wish MobyGames (or similar) has a way to automatically count unique names in particular sections. It would make it way easier to get good ideas of team scale without counting every voice actor, European marketing team member etc. and just figure out the number of people actually making the game. Voice acting, Euro release etc. is an actual cost, but it's one that could be applied essentially equally to virtually any game (assuming enough distinct characters to have an equal number of VAs)
>>1006784 That investigation about money laundering should be ongoing all the time. In the same way that GamerGate exposed corruption in the industry, it can also expose corruption in countries' governments. Especially now that normalfags are lurking way more on image boards and learning the truth, it is a good chance to redpill many residents around the world o the crimes committed by their politicians.
>>1006840 >>1006797 In most companies, its not even about money laundering, its simply accounting guys shifting the numbers to benefit their team, micromanaging every little scrap poorly, and thus each department goes "well we better fully use our allocated budget or it'll go to waste". So if you have allocated budget of $1000 on staplers and the work only require $200 worth of staplers (because accounting dept is stupid and don't know the ground reality), you can spend $800 on other shit and just type $1000 on the inventory. This is usually not malicious, the accounting knows its not possible to account for every little cost and they benefit nothing from saving the company's money. This also acts as an emergency fund when shit goes down. That's also how department dinners and vacations get extra money. However, as soon as the good managers keeping things in check leave, the bloat starts to appear. Suddenly the bad manager will need $1200 worth of staplers, certain stuff gets less allocation, and when shit does go down, they have no extra funds (which previously would've been saved by good manager) and have to beg the higher up, who put a red mark on the department and start thinking of cleaning the department at the next quarterly meeting. Rinse and repeat.
>>1006886 No company has accurate accounting. "Good" accounting is largely seen as figuring out how to shovel losses into specific departments. Companies will sometimes even inflate their losses. And I don't just mean Warner Brothers writing off finished movies because they think the tax benefit outweighs a release. One of my prior jobs was accounting for internal engineering hours spent at 5x our actual rate of pay, and the managements would pull their hair out if more than a couple weeks was spent on any project because it was being self-reported to the higher-ups that two dudes working on something for a couple weeks was like $60,000 of labor. I wish I could tell you we were making that much, but no, that was maybe $6,000 worth of labor plus benefits. They were reporting our (unpaid) overtime hours, too. Imagine working 50 hours and being told that you went way over budget even though you never saw a cent. Again, these were being reported internally as massive losses and it led to support being cut from vital programs because accountants saw red everywhere. But the money was never actually spent. The losses were only in their heads. The only way you can view it as a loss is if we could bill a client that full rate for 100% of engineering time. Could engineers be farmed out on occasion? Yes, absolutely. Was it a common occurence? No. Should you budget your company's time and staffing requirements around loaning out your resources literally all of the time? Not unless you're a complete moron.
>release Game 2 >it makes 20% more money than Game 1, hell yeah >now publisher expects you to make 20% more on the next one, and the next one, and the next one >because now they want you to do 20% better than 120% that means the bar keeps getting proportionally higher >studio grows, game's scope grows >maybe the studio gets bought by a bigger one or the publisher, which promises to continue to fund your never ending orobouros of trash >your humble studio of a few dozen people now balloons to hundreds >make game riddled with DLC and live service garbage because the scope of a simple campaign + multiplayer does not retain players and now you have to make 500% of what you used to make normally to pay your studio of a small village of people >oh shit, Game 9 didn't hit this unreasonable benchmark so the $300 million spent on development is all for naught >mass layoffs >studio closures >all the big players behind the studio have a mid life crisis and either keep their next company small, or form another studio being "FROM THE MAKERS OF GAME XYZ" and then get funded/bought out by a big publisher again, repeating the cycle
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>>1006897 >One of my prior jobs was accounting for internal engineering hours spent at 5x our actual rate of pay, and the managements would pull their hair out if more than a couple weeks was spent on any project because it was being self-reported to the higher-ups that two dudes working on something for a couple weeks was like $60,000 of labor. I wish I could tell you we were making that much, but no, that was maybe $6,000 worth of labor plus benefits That must've been crazy to deal with.
It's jews laundering money, pure and simple. You want to make a game? Well you have to use (((union))) voice actors and talent. And pay licensing fees. Nobody is going to play your game if you don't market it, and only certified streamers and TV ads are going to make it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting Oh hey, did you know that the Lord of the Rings trilogy, despite costing only $281 million and grossing $2.988 billion (with a B!) at the box office, it was never profitable?
How doea a single player game cost 200 million to make.
>>1007353 Money laundering, tithe for the DEI crowd, viral/fake marketing, paying off reviewers, etc, etc...
>How doea a single player game cost 200 million to make. Look at the credits of any 200 million single player game, those people all get compensated
>>1007353 Single player is more likely to cost a lot as you need a lot of content that simply doesn't need to exist in a MP only scenario and more content in general vs a MP only game.
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>>1007390 But 200 million is what concord's cost was, anon. And that is a MP only gaem.
>>1007394 If like they said they were trying to build a whole universe then it's introducing contents you'd usually only find in SP games (fully voiced cutscenes CGI or in engine), not to mention 8 years in dev even for a modestly sized studio is just an insane amount of money by itself.
>more than double the amount of workers >technology that would make developers in 2008 cream themselves >still make a worse game The issues in the video game industry are systemic. While the immense popularity of video games has driven growth, it has also attracted lower talent and fostered poor practices. Consider the number of "creatives" working on a single game, often sequels where most gameplay elements were previously established and refined. By poor practices, I mean situations where numerous higher-ups pretend to contribute by offering guidance that sounds smart, driven by executives who believe this approach will lead to a better, more competitive game. Although game companies aim to minimize costs wherever possible, they genuinely believe these layers of management add value, and being so out of touch it's a given that they'll bite that. Compounding this, many industry professionals are not gamers themselves—they are drawn to the field by its popularity and perceived financial opportunities rather than a genuine interest in the medium. As a result, their design ideas are often flawed at best and disastrous at worst. This leads to games developed by teams that are resistant to criticism—sometimes justifiably so, as casual players may lack critical insights, but this stance often backfires. Games end up being designed around "imagined opportunities" that haven't been explored, missing the core elements that made earlier successful games. The only real solution is a complete overhaul of the industry's culture. Additionally, modern games are often bloated with content, driven by the misguided belief that more is better. This bloating requires a massive number of man-hours across various fields, with high base costs per hour. When you add incompetence to the mix, these projects become even more time-consuming and expensive, which explains why even relatively simple AAA games with seemingly clear directions can cost millions to produce. That's a lot of random rambling, but hopefully it makes sense.
>>1006784 >Dustborn What is dustbin?
They need to stop using face scan/irl persons likeness. The royalties are too fuckin much and half the time the person isn't even likeable. Also they need to return to making their own music instead of paying out the ass for music royalties.
>>1007690 The thing is they alter the faces of the people to be ugly.
>>1007702 Only the women. They're more than capable of accurately scanning in handsome men. Because they're faggots and feminists and trannies who hate beautiful women because they can't get one or will never be one.


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