I always hear that Triple A video games cost millions to make why is that? Is it that all cost of workers? Does it cost money for a single person to make a game? Thanks in advance
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Teams can be quite large, and a small number of teams I’ve worked on have had over 200 employees.
Office space has to be paid.
Salaries have to be paid. The lowest paid devs usually still make 50k annually. I suspect (but am not sure) the average salary is at least double that.
Hardware has to be bought and paid for. This includes monitors, computers, accessories, and if it’s for a console game, special consoles known as dev kits. I haven’t worked on console in a long time, but I seem to recall back in the early/mid 2000s, a console dev kit could be over 20k. And you’d need a lot more than one.
If you are publishing for a console, you also have to submit your game to the console manufacturer for testing to ensure it meets minimum specified requirements and a few other requirements. That’s also expensive because you have to pay the console manufacturers to submit the game for their review. And you cannot publish on their platform without their sign off.
If there is an online component, you also have to pay for the server farms.
To circle back to the salary bit… 100 * 50,000 = 5,000,000. So that is for headcount alone, and lowballing, for some of the larger game teams.
It’s just the sheer amount of work required. Think about, say, GTA or Assassin’s Creed, or something similar. Someone has modelled an ENTIRE CITY to the finest detail, wrote hours worth of music, created, animated and voiced tons of characters, including the one you’re playing, designed and tested hours upon hours of gameplay. Even excluding all technical work (e. g. working on a game engine, which some games do), the sheer amount of artwork is staggering. This is, mainly, why it requires large teams of people and huge sums of money to make one of these, and the only reason it is economically feasible to sell it for like 60 bucks is because many people play it.
Let’s just take the basics of producing a game (and I’m sure I missed A LOT). From the top of my head:
– Licensing an engine
– Licensing an IP (if not working with an original one)
– Paying the writer
– Paying the design team, layout team, animation team, level design team, texture team, coding team, scripting team, management,
– Contracting a voice acting company for recording, paying actors, mixing, editing, SFX
– Contracting a composer (or several), hiring an orchestra, paying for the recording studio, mixing, editing, etc. Licensing any existing tracks vital for the score.
– Paying/contracting a software testing team
– Paying the overheads, electricity, 401K, insurances, cars, coffee, etc.
– Paying for marketing, ad presence, con presence, news presence
– Printing and producing physicxal copies, merch, etc.
Now you CAN do nearly all of that yourself, and drastically cut down on cost, but you will have to be a trained programmer/writer/musician/businessman/marketing expert. And there’s not much of those running around since the Commodore days.
Get 100-200 highly smart and highly paid people on a team and pay them for a year to make a game. It adds up real quick.
The other answers here pretty much nail the basic idea (it’s all about the amount of labor required), but I just wanted to add the point that AAA games are continuing to become more expensive to make as the level of detail required (quality and sheer volume of art assets) continues to increase compared to just 10 or 20 years ago. (See something like: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=bN7TiIZBc7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN7TiIZBc7g) .) Some of the most successful games just 10 or 20 years ago would’ve had a small fraction of the team sizes of AAA games today.
Because it takes a lot of time and you have to pay all those coders/artists for their hours of hard work.
Then, you have to rent a studio for your team to work. Need motion capture ? Well those devices are not cheap, and you’ll have to pay the actors as well.
Oh, and did I speak about marketing already ? Video-games market is saturated with indie productions so you better invest into ads if you want people to actually hear about your game and buy it.
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