Over the past few years, many gamers have noticed that game developers seem to take a lot longer than they ever have before and have been curious as to why. Due to a recent leak of redacted documents, there has been information that has been revealed to explain this. That is, many AAA games are getting over a $200 Million budget to hire almost 200 developers per project.
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Why Are Certain Game Developers Getting Such a Large Budget?
Recently many gamers have asked the question as to why development studios have such a long development stage and a larger budget. The answer is quite clear, the size and quality of recent AAA games has encouraged game developers to put more money into creating these games and hiring more staff to keep up with the demand of work. Some of the most recent examples are the likes of The Last Of Us 2 and Horizon Forbidden West, as TLOU2 had 200 game developers working on it, whilst Horizon Forbidden West had over 300!
Due to the large number of game developers that are working on these projects, it would be understandable that the studios that own these franchises would need to have a large budget to be able to ensure that these developers have everything they need to get these games out with the features that are expected these days of AAA games.
However, this budget is not all down to hiring staff as the most game developers are only paid around $15,000 a month, which depending on who you ask is either a low rate or a high rate. This cost isn’t just about paying the game developers, it is about keeping them for the entire development stage as recent games are taking up to 5 years to develop they will somehow need to keep these developers so paying them a large budget encourages them to stay.
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What Could This Kind of Budget Do for Other Game Developers?
Over recent years we have seen a big increase in small game franchises that have made big impacts in the field of gaming, most notably Indie games; these games tend to be developed by incredibly small teams or even sometimes just by one person. These games don’t tend to be as large scale as the likes of TLOU2, but they still have amazing graphics, good content and fun gameplay, but what would they be like if they had as large a budget as games like TLOU2?
For most Indie games they don’t tend to see a large budget for some; they will only see between $50,000 to roughly $700,000, which in comparison is incredible; for example, one of the most popular Indie games over the past few years, Undertale was developed by just one person. Now if a game that is developed by one person is that good imagine what the developer could do with a $200 Million budget; the only difference between a AAA game and an Indie game is the time to develop them, as Indie games can take less than a year to develop as they are smaller, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
For now, we expect games to get larger budgets and to take longer in development, which many gamers would not be happy about, but this is the price we pay for a working and fun game to play on release. What do you think about this? Would you rather see Indie games get the same budget as AAA games? Let us know in the comments!
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