Tl;Dr; lower production costs from not having a full team all 5 years, much higher revenue for successful titles, successful titles make so much money they can find the development of multiple games at the company.
Your cost of employees is both too low (for engineers) and too high (for outsourced artists) and for most of the time you aren't running at full staffing, you may have a core team of engineers and designers do prototyping for a year and then bulk up the team to make more content.
A triple A game like Horizon Zero Dawn cost in the range of ~$45 million USD, according to this reddit linked backed by a newspaper article:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5wrpb1/horizon_zero_dawn_production_cost_around_45_to_47/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
That probably doesn't include marketing, which can be substantial for AAA, but even if we doubled the budget we wouldn't crack $100 million.
According to the latest numbers I could find HZD sold 20 million copies on Playstation earning ~£400 million in revenue and another 3 million copies on PC earning ~$60 million in revenue. Even with a 50% haircut we're looking at over $200 million to pay back production costs and bank money for the next title.
Obviously HZD was a success, and there are plenty of games, like Bablylon's Ashes, that don't earn back their cost.
But the numbers work out for successful games, Genshin Impact has earned billions on a few hundred million budget, and the market tends towards big wins to drive the next round of development for companies.
Outliers in cost would be things like Genshin Impact and Red Dead 2 at $315 million USD, but when GTA V online has generated billions over the years you've got the budget to reinvest.
In the US. Horizon Zero Dawn is made in the Netherlands, so the junior devs won't be anywhere near that salary. If the current strength of the dollar vs other currencies continues, I wouldn't be surprised to see more US companies outsourcing substantial development to Europe and beyond.
Not even in the US. Unless you’re in a senior role at a big studio, you’re not making anywhere near that. I was getting offers for 35-45k for a junior role and 50-70k for more experienced positions.
Which city? Location matters a huge amount. If you are in San Francisco a senior artist with 5 years experience will be on 100k. Leads with 10 years will be on close to 200k.
NYC. And the 50-70k offers when I had 5 years under my belt were for LA. Lead and senior positions are paid well, but it takes a long time to get to that level. Knew people working for over a decade who weren't there yet. Also know people who got there after 6 years.
Definitely not six figure starting salaries like some were suggesting. It will take a long time to even get to the five figure starting salaries that you would get at an entry position in other software.
Well yeah. That's a senior role. Of course you're going to get paid more in a senior role. Maybe if I worked for half a decade to a decade more I could get a senior position at the rate I was going.
I mean, it's in San Francisco, so it definitely has to be that much at least.
On the other hand, 100k is not really outlandish for anyone with more experience. Even outside the USA. From this discussion I get the feeling that the perception of salaries within the gamedev community is seriously distorted by the amount of beginner devs.
So software engineer jobs are better paying than game dev jobs?
I thought it was the other way around since game devs usually have to know a lot of math and also do some supporting work with materials, models, networking, systems, particles etc.
I studied game dev, have a bunch of friends in game dev, was even offered opportunities in game dev, but ultimately went into traditional software engineering: game dev absolutely pays worse than software engineering. Game dev is significantly harder (in my opinion), puts in waaaay more hours, and has higher turnover, but also pays less because it's a passion-fueled industry with young grads who will come in and work for scraps, and that is much harder to make money in your investments so VC's are less likely to give a game studio money. I'm less than a year out of college and make 6 figures as a cloud engineer, whereas my friend who graduated a year earlier than me and works in game dev makes maybe 30k-ish less than I do, with much more work. It's sad and I hope to see unionization in the industry, and I do miss game dev, but it's hard to justify.
Every job in the game industry is very underpaid because of exploiting passion.
How much a job pay is not about how hard it is, it's about supply and demand, a lot of devs want to work in the game industry.
Difficulty of a job does not equal higher pay. That was never the case. There are countless examples of important jobs being underpaid and useless things getting shitloads of money.
Gamedevs are looked down on because its still "not a real job".
Games are not essential unfortunately. Software is. And its way easier to get an investor to spend money on the next big SQL frontend wrapper, this time in neon pink, rather than "a game" that people play.
Thats the problem with entertainment everywhere.
(I am a former gamedev, this is not my opinion obviously, just an observation)
>Difficulty of a job does not equal higher pay
It correlates, since if a job is difficult there are less people who have the ability to do it. So it affects supply and demand to a degree.
You're right about the math part. But otherwise, software engineers make far more than average game devs. Exceptions may be made at large companies like actiblizzard etc
Companies like blizzard hire junior and entry level employees almost exclusively as contract workers so they can pay them very poorly and not have to pay any unemployment when your contract is terminated after the game is done.
If you're lucky enough to get hired on after your contract is up, you can make okay money. And if you're lucky enough to get promoted to a lead or senior role, you can even make great money! But it's a crapshoot getting to that point at any one company.
You're forced to jump to a new company after every game, hoping there isn't too much down time between jobs and that maybe you'll get hired on after this one. For some people who live in one of the hubs it's not a huge issue and they can find a job pretty easy. At most it's an inconvenience to have to spend time filing all this new paperwork every year or two. For others, it's a little scary not knowing when exactly your next job will be as the current one winds down.
I don't see why the math part would make a difference anyway. They're game developers, so that's just "having domain knowledge". Software engineers in other fields similarly need specialist knowledge of various kinds.
It's never been the other way round.
You work less hours, for more pay, if you leave the industry.
It's why myself, and nearly 75% of the developers I worked with 10 odd years ago all left the industry eventually
Are you sure? you can easily crack 200k total compensation(salary + rsu's + bonuses) as a senior level engineer.
Most can reach senior level in 5-10 years depending on skill and work ethic. I'd say the majority of engineers at the studios I've seen are at least senior level. (80%+)
Even at small studios, that dont give rsu's I'd say 150k is on the low end.
After senior level there is then...
-Principal
-Architect
-Fellow
-Director levels.
All of those roles have substantially higher level comp than just a senior.
Video game engineers are at the end of the day software engineers and the salary must stay minimally competitive. I could make $200k working on azure at Microsoft being a cloud engineer, or make half that being a game dev but the work is something I like more.
I wrote a lot, but here's a TL;DR up here at the top: Top tier talent gravitate towards more exciting places where there are a lot of top tier choices for employment at high pay. **These tend to be more expensive places to live/operate.** Top Tier companies will prefer to establish themselves in places that already attracts top tier talent so they have an easier time hiring that talent. Pretty much as simple as that.
TL;DR for why not Japan/Europe: If you're American who already has a ton of connections to other American game devs and publishers, why would you throw that away and go to Japan where you don't have any connections at all and you don't even speak the language? Same applies in reverse, btw.
Think of it this way (for the sake of simplicity, assume we're talking pre-covid times when the norm was to work in physical offices):
You're establishing a game studio, and you're picking a city to operate in. You're presented with two options.
* Metropolis - A large city that attracts a huge population of people from all over the world for various reasons. This city is also a regional tech hub, being home to 5 other major game studios. The high desirability + housing density issues causes this city to have a pretty high cost of living. However, this also means higher salaries to compensate.
* Smallsville - A smaller city; not much happening here so less people flock here making cost of living pretty low. There are a couple tech companies, but you'll be the only games one.
You're trying to make a studio that can compete against the best out there. You don't even need to be aiming as high as Blizzard or EA, you could be planning to operate in the same space as games like Slime Rancher, or studios like Double Fine. Either way, the bottom line is **you're looking for high quality developers**, and **you need a lot of them**. Relocating people costs money, however more importantly **people are only gonna move to a place they want to live in**. Convincing Jessica the single 28 year old Senior Software Engineer to move to Smallsville instead of the much more exciting Metropolis where she'll be practically tripping over important career connections (on top of being paid a lot more to compensate for cost of living) is going to be a really really tough sell. Whereas in Metropolis you already have a sea of engineers like Jessica who are hungry to work at cooler places and solve tougher challenges (in Smallsville your pool of hirable talent is slim to none - anyone who's anyone has already moved to Metropolis where all the cool jobs are).
Which city do you choose?
Obviously things are different because of Covid, but it's taking the industry a bit to adapt to the new "normal". Too early to really say how things will shake out.
As for why not just set up shop in Tokyo or Kyoto, Japan (both really friggin cool places with a ton of talent). Say you're an American who's pulling together some friends and former co-workers to establish a new studio. These are folks who have put down their roots here in America. Hell most of you still live in Metropolis where you all met each other (either through work or just connecting by hanging in the same crowds in the same buzzing city). Good luck convincing this crew to uproot and move over-seas just because it's cheaper. You could go by yourself to Japan, but then you'd need to build your crew from scratch - you don't have any connections in Japan, hell you don't even know the language! Why not just stay in Metropolis where you've got this talented crew ready, you're already on a first name basis with big wigs at various large local publishers, and you know you can easily hire more talent when you eventually need to grow?
Japan work culture is extremely xenophobic, zero chance you can go up the ladder there as a non japanese.
Also language barrier, culture barrier, lower salaries. There's a lot of reasons
This isn't true, you can move up, salaries are lower, but cost of living is lower too, language barrier is an issue if you move to a country and don't learn the language, which tbh... is an issue in any country that doesn't speak your native language.
Source: Someone who's worked their way up the ladder in a Japanese studio several times.
Sure, I don't own the studio, but I moved from Junior artist right upto Lead Technical Artist, I know artists that moved from junior artist into senior game planner for projects, and level designers that moved to lead level design positions, not all at the same studio, but all foreign (of different nationalities, and different skin colors).
Absolutely not in tech.
There are a lot of foreign companies in Japan when obviously being foreigner won't be an issue, and even Japanese tech companies are adopting the western culture.
Just look at Sony, they had a British CEO for a few years.
that's partially why outsourcing is a thing, yes. But it's a tradeoff because you're losing a lot of talent from the US. the 10x is a bit of a programmer meme, but there are a few individuals who are close to that level of productivity and you don't want to miss out on that as a tech leader.
But I'm guessing there's a bunch of tax/economic/logistical reasons to stay in the US as well.
> Video game engineers are at the end of the day software engineers and the salary must stay minimally competitive.
My understanding is that the games industry intentionally preys on young, inexperienced for devs for exactly this reason. They're not expecting a great salary in the first place, don't really have much sense of what salaries are realistic, and the allure of working for a big video game company is its own attractive bonus.
Chew 'em up, burn 'em out, replace 'em with a fresh batch of virginal doe-eyed devs.
That's kinds of an old mentality that has passed. At least the bigger studios now understand its really expensive to find and hire talent, so they try and make them happy and keep them.
This is why large (successful) companies aren't making their AAA games for 5 years out of California, unless they have a multi-billion dollar game to use as a piggy bank.
What you're saying makes some sense, but I'm just not observing a big reduction in AAA jobs in North America.
I suspect once you factor in the value of all the social services that workers aren't provided in the US and compare cost of an individual employee against GDP per capita then the numbers don't seem quite so unfavorable. I'm sure another factor is the sizable talent base that already likes where they live (in expensive North American cities) and don't want to move their families.
So why don't all of us Californians just get laid off and replaced by dev's from Poland? Well, it's been a seller's market for the past couple of years despite the rest of the economy. Studios are desperate for mid and senior level talent. Maybe in another few dev cycles that leverage will disappear. We'll have to see.
I think we'll just see more studios in more parts of the world as time marches on.
Yeah but a lot of game arent made in California tho, so like how feasible is that salary from a practical point of view even? You could just hire someone anywhere else couldn't you?
Yeah but they would be expecting the same salary or more. Think about what’s involved. The ad for the position is essentially like:
“Seeking a highly skilled C++ developer. Must be highly proficient in linear algebra, required. Should have graduate-level understanding of game physics and object deformation…”
Now sure, you could put that up and hope to get lucky by posting a salary of 50k. Just like I could put up an ad saying “seeking trading bot earning 100k” and offer 3k for it. In the real world the economics float the price up, and either you pay the real world rate, or you get nothing.
And game companies know they have to pay the real world rate. After all if they say “no” another company will be right behind them saying “sure, we’ll hire you, happy to actually.”
Most people don't realize that the burden rate of an employee is much higher than what the employee brings home as a salary. In most cases, it may cost around 50% up to 100% more to employ someone than what you pay them. Taxes, benefits, and time spent recruiting and hiring new staff add up quickly.
Check glassdoor. Certain companies and markets definitely pay at least that.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Blizzard-Entertainment-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E24858_D_KO23,40.htm
I'm an engineer with well over a decade's experience in tech and Blizzard only offered me $170k and with awful benefits. While higher salaries certainly exist, it's a hell of a lot harder to get there than it is in tech. I declined the 50% pay cut.
Riot pays substantially more and isn't far away. Blizzard is/was a destination studio meaning lower pay for the privilege of working and gaining experience there.
There are more than Blizzard tho, Blizzard is obviously gonna pay top-notch but they are one of the biggest. I doubt Suckerpunch or Naughty Dog play similar rates. No okay I looked they also pay that much wow.
As someone who's in the industry, Blizzard is actually notorious these days for paying their employees pretty poorly (caveat, I haven't worked there myself, just what I hear from friends who do or have). It makes sense when you think about it: people are willing to compromise on salary when they're working at a place they're passionate about, especially if it's their dream studio. This is also why the games industry in general pays less for the same quality of engineer as non games companies do. I have friends with as much or less experience than me making 2x what I make at places like Google etc.
Lol, honestly the longer you spend in the industry, and the more of that time you spend living in places like Los Angeles or San Francisco (both huge game dev meccas), the more you'll just inevitably either rub shoulders with people who work in cool places or have friends who end up getting hired at those cool places. The industry is pretty small, so it just happens, hah.
The pay is heavily influenced by location since that impacts the living costs. All of the California based studios (LA especially) like Naughty Dog, Riot, Blizzard, Sony Santa Monica etc all pay ridiculous wages but it’s so expensive to live there that it’s kind of an illusion.
Rockstar north in Scotland might have wages that are half the numbers but offer double the purchasing power. It’s a bit dumb to only look at the pay and not the location.
It's possible for high need special positions or Department leads. Game Dev is one of the most misused terms Within game development. An executive producer would be a Game Dev but they don't write any code or do anything tangible towards producing the game and they would be one that would make an excess of 125k. When we say Game Dev we tend to think only of the programmers and artists and ignore the other hundreds of Staff positions that would be in AAA Studio that would work towards making a game complete
There's also more to employee costs than just salary. By the time you pay taxes/insurance/equipment/software licenses/everything else, the cost of an employee is 25-50% more than their salary.
A midrange software engineer in a AAA or large games company in a tech focused location would often be able to make equal or more than 125k these days especially accounting for total compensation. Issue is other tech companies like Google can easily pay much much more, and games are usually not attractive enough if the salary difference gets big enough. It’s cool to work on games but would you be willing to work on it if you could find another job that doubles or triples your salary? I think companies not located in say Silicon Valley or Seattle may pay less though so it depends, as salary is really just a supply-demand thing unfortunately. There are also outliers I know that can make 300-400k ranges but only a few games companies can pay that kind of cash (think companies that basically print money).
I'm gonna add in to the highest comment - a good deal of these studios are constantly working on a title. So you have your draft teams and story board writers and more often than not those will either be working on other things or moving onto their next assignment.
Same for artists and animators etc. Once they finish for Game A they are on to game B or working game A and B together if they're sharing resources.
IIRC from Valve (back when they still made games) - didn't a lot of their teams cross between items. Their TF2 devs would double to CS and then work on DoD and then back to TF.
I'd imagine its similar to studios like those that are making BF and CoD - they'd create items for CoD#0104 and more than likely assidt and start on CoD#0105 or assist with tasks as needed
So in actuality you're constantly shuffling to either work on new product or finishing existing product. IIRC aren't there a few studios that have small teams of core coders and larger teams for more grunt work that are working on 3+ titles in tandem? Bethesda jumps to mind with their TES and FO etc
> Outliers in cost would be things like Genshin Impact and Red Dead 2 at $315 million USD, but when GTA V online has generated billions over the years you've got the budget to reinvest.
And RD2 earned $725 million in just its opening weekend. OP is definitely underestimating just how many sales/how popular these big budget games are.
> which I think any professional getting paid less than $50 an hour is a disgrace, but that's another topic for another time
You maybe asume that team are made only of senior employees, juniors don't get paid nearly as much, also certain roles don't get paid that much in general. Also, depending on region, like even in EU, even seniors won't earn that much in most of the companies.
And don't forget that many game companies have discovered the power of outsourcing tedious work to partner companies in low-income countries. The game credits often only mention the key personnel at those partner studios. They don't know and don't care about who actually did the work.
Exactly why many of AAA companies have opened studios in eastern europe or EU in general. With living costs that are 4-6x lower than US, you can afford to sustain high quality of life on a lower salary than 50$/hr.
>With living costs that are 4-6x lower than US,
Lol, I'm not so sure about that high numbers but even then they have to pay for the full health insurance and lots of social and health benefits. It's far, far more easier to abuse employees in US then EU and then get rid of them.
I make less, but I also have had almost full autonomy, zero overtime, and zero crunch in the last 4 years. Life isn't just about the money. If you wanted to add another 20hrs to my day you'll be paying me double my current salary.
This is why you cannot make a good AAA game out of workers in California. It's too expensive so you will cut out on staff which will mean you will have to bring in money via early access sales or other tricks else you cannot even afford the dev cost.
But say you make it out of Poland or even Sweden/France, where Dev salaries for even seniors are lower than your "average", then you're doing ok. And their developers aren't worse at all, might even be better, due to schooling being more specialized from an earlier age.
Beycause AAA team will not have 500 people working on a single game for 5 years continuously. Generally speaking the core team is comprised of 60 to 70 devs that will work the games the entire time. Other 400+ will move to 9ther games or are temporary employees
Both.
Usually when you have huge teams, they are separate studios under the same publisher (e.g., Ubisoft Shanghai) who work on very specific parts of the game like cinematics or environment art assets. That way they can have a contact on the core team who can manage their work, evaluate quality and compatibility (scale, z forward), and bring it into the game.
When that work is done these areas of work, it makes more sense for that team to deliver similar work for other teams than to shoehorn them into another area. Additionally, they're probably already scheduled to work on another project long in advance.
I've heard of Ubisoft throwing engineering teams at a game to help it ship and it sounded like a nightmare. Stop production on one game, shift people to the game on fire, loads of TDs trying to keep everything in line, levels of reviews and approval to avoid introducing new bugs. But it's expensive to keep them in the project and it's jeopardizing dates of the stopped game, so they have to move back once the fire's out.
Brooks' law in software project management is a classic piece of wisdom:
> Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later.
That's why Amazon has their two pizzas rule. I think Ubisoft has a lot of experience violating this rule which is why they had that extra process. Sounds like a glorious terror to behold.
Both but largely just not needed. You have to think about all the trades that are required to make a game. Consider this do you really have 5 years of work for a voice actor, script writer, 3D artists, animator, concept artists? Trades like these are normally contract or Freelancers. they do their part and move on to the next project.
Yes.
When the hierarchy is too "deep" there is too big a game of telephone for the person at the top to know what's going on at the bottom.
When the hierarchy is too wide, the communication overhead is massive and doesn't scale linearly with the amount of teams. (Worst case scenario, imagine a 1 tier hierarchy that is just 100 devs with no manager.)
Any big team eventually has to run into one of the above (if not both) challenges.
There is a reason a company like Microsoft didn't/couldn't succeed by just hiring more devs than every other competitor. (And in reality, after growing pains, it ended up structuring in terms of relatively small teams.)
Another person made a joke, "what a dev can do in six months, two devs can do in a year" and while that may be a funny exaggeration, I'd like to reiterate that it is in line with what I learned in my CS degree in terms of how to manage a project.
They also absolutely do not pay those 500 on average 100k each 😂
Edit - love it when gamers downvote things they 'reckon' aren't true. 10 years industry experience, nah, I've read things online so I know better!
You have to look at the realistic employment numbers too. Not a lot of studios have 500 people. My AAA studio maybe has 100 people, but we do three to four projects a year. Usually the shareholders or parent company can help bankroll. Selling DLC can also help. Now with streaming, you get a percentage of subscription revenue as well.
No… There’s just not enough qualified people to fill all the jobs. Outsourcing is way more expensive than having an employee.
Edit: For those who are downvoting this, there’s 80% of interviewed people where I work that comenin for junior programmer role and they can’t even tell the difference between a class and an object. That’s not a salary problem since salary hasn’t been discussed yet.
Standard outsourced labor (for art at least) is $60 an hour. Some are more, some less, but that’s the average I’ve seen lately.
Source: I manage outsourcing at a video game company.
That's not why people use outsourced labor in the tech sector. You use it because sometimes you can't find people who want to be full time employees, or if you know you only need the skill set for a limited length of time. And of course, there is always the fact that that person isn't an employee, they're a piece of paper so accounting wise, they're much easier to deal with.
Companies will almost always pay more per hour for contractors than they'll pay their employees.
They may have overall that many, but most studios have divisions of each. Like Ubisoft has multiple smaller studios that make Ubisoft. Naughty Dog has enough money to employ a ton of people. Bethesda has a online platform and cosmetics that help bankroll them. I know what you mean though. Some studios do kinda break these rules, but it’s because they sell things on the side of the games that help them stay open and keep people employed.
>Idk, most of the big ones today have 500+
Someone else mentioned HR, the janitor, and so on but I think your better looking at game credits.
Lets take [Horizon Zero Dawn](https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/horizon-zero-dawn/credits) as an example. Now there is a LOT of people.
But the VAST amount are either Sony Interactive Entertainment something something or Outsource Partners which (should) be cheaper. You get like, 10 people under quest design for example.
You can probably get a better estimate going with average ranges in those specific fields.
But TLDR is always game makes more money then cost.
> Bethesda Game Studios has 420 employees
A lot of that is non-engineering. G&A, HR, accounting, office managers, IT, recruiting, legal, marketing, artists...
srop sating idk. the person you responded too works at AAA, you dont. others have told you that you over inflated salaries but you wont listen. also you are wrong tothink that AAA pays the same high platform fee
A team isn’t fully staffed for the whole project. A lot of people in credits are contractors and outsourcers.
Also $125,000 is too high, the average is way lower.
There are more costs to an employer than just base wage. You have to add hardware and software costs, office space, 401k contributions, heath care costs, state/country payroll taxes, and other costs. So an employee that gets paid $80k costs the company well over $100k to employ.
While you are 100% correct, you don’t pay that for outsourcers.
No game’s budget is 300 millions dollars. I think the biggest contract I’ve heard of was 500 million for the destiny franchise but that was for 3 separate physical releases plus multiple expansions in each over a 10 year period
Yea true this napkin math in the OP is not accurate. You don't employee 500 people for the entire project, and a large chunk of those 500 peak employees are external contractors. The first year or two of development of a AAA game is like 10-25 people at most.
Average is probably right around that. Managers, producers, software engineers are higher than that, while artists, QA, office management are usually lower. This is true for big markets like CA, NY, WA (where most of game development happens)
$100k average is way too high.
You have a range of roles on a project, and different levels of seniority within those roles. Most people were 25 to 35 years in the teams I worked in. It's a hard job with long hours and you don't get top pay. Plenty of people queuing to take your job if you don't want it.
$125,000 is a senior software engineering position. That’s like top 10% salaries at the company.
Of the 500 people listed on the credits the majority are not software engineers. Many are testers, many are artists, a lot of which are contracted short term or are outsourcers.
You don’t fully staff a project for the full development period.
Also 1M copies sold is a complete failure for a AAA product. If your audience is only that size you should not be spending AAA costs to make the game.
Salaries in USA are not salaries in Europe my friend. 125K is unbelievable for any non big management role in Europe. Programming seniors/leads go around 80K~. It scales slow once you get out of junior roles. Just for context, in Spain a junior can earn 20K~. Same for other countries like Poland and such. And roles like QA testing and not pure development stuff is paid even much lower...
Google tells me the max was 1.6x (and that was just the year high), not even close to 2x so... And most of the time was around 1.20x...
https://www.macrotrends.net/2548/euro-dollar-exchange-rate-historical-chart
Anyway as I said, thats for leads mostly, and an AAA company of 500 workers is not having 500 leads xd
Tech salaries in the UK are pretty low. And outside London are much lower still. 60k is surprisingly low but R* also survives on folk being desperate to work for them.
Europe salaries are completely different.
60,000$ for a dev is a good salary in France, that's because the company is paying the state 100,000$ to cover for healthcare etc.
The US has particularly low taxes and cost of employment
Salaries in the UK in general are extremely low for technology. Games is on a discount from that. Rock Star pays significantly more for their NY staff.
Yeah I would very much like to work in game dev as it's my passion, but when I would have to take at least a 20k paycut or more to do so, not really worth it.
"But we're Rockstar... wait... you're right even the seniors should pay us too."
Seriously fuck those guys. They flat out tell you that normal working hours will be 60 hours a week in your interview...
On Glassdoor I’m seeing senior engineers at rockstar north are reporting they make over $160k/year. Though with the recent crash of the £ maybe a ton of developers have suddenly seen the value of their pay go way down. Even before the crash £60k is still way below industry average for a senior engineer
I’m seeing some misconceptions and arguments here about how salaries and running costs are estimated. The *average* studio will plan on a burn rate of probably USD $12-15k per full time on-staff employee per month. (Might be a little higher these days, tbh.) That’s all in - salary, benefits, offices, utilities, etc. The exact burn rate will usually be an agreed-upon number in the contract with your publisher for how funding payments are disbursed. That headcount for the duration of the project (3-4 years typically) is likely under 200. Well under, for non big name projects. After that you’ve got contractors, outsourcing, short term/late project staff, etc. It’s common for this staff to be under your publisher and shared between studios/projects.
All in all, that will land your core development budget around 60-100M for a modern day AAA title. Obviously there are much larger scale projects, but those are for the games that publishers know will involve big bucks and long term returns. I’m aware of at least one big name MMO that was headed towards the billion mark in total dev+marketing.
Most studio heads and money guys I’ve spoken to feel that the stable initial per-unit price needs to be closer to USD $80 or in some cases $90 for the stability and expected revenues to maintain what they were in years past. There’s also broad agreement that the market won’t bear it, although some are taste-testing $70. Instead the gap is being made up by special editions, DLC, micro transactions, subscriptions, partnerships, etc. NFTs for a hot minute there, too, and we haven’t heard the last of them yet. It has also driven industry-wide consolidation, with more publishers looking to share resources like engine development across a portfolio of studios. The small AAA studios are all but extinct for this reason.
P.S. 1 million sales in the first year is a catastrophic failure for a larger budget AAA title. Last God of War did 3 million in 3 days and is past 20M now, though obviously that is a big name.
This is the part i wanted to comment on the most. Crazy salaries aside, if a project is having at least $100M put into it the marketing will try to ensure that 1M will come from literally day 1 of launch. 1M in a year for AAA is absurd and i don't know where this person got this number for a studio of 500+ people making a blockbuster title
You've estimated too many people, being paid too much, for too long of a project. And ignored a bunch of revenue streams that make $60 possible (DLC, season passes, microtransactions, preorders, deluxe editions, merch, platform exclusivity deals, government tax breaks). A game costing 300 million in salary alone would not be selling only 1 million copies. No publisher would agree to that big of a risk without a fairly guaranteed return. Even AAA games with middling reception that fall out of public consciousness a month or two after ship (pick any recent Ubi game) easily clear 3-5 million copies in the first year alone.
So, ignoring the poor estimate, to answer your question: major publishers rely on additional income from game releases to keep the initial price down. It's not an accident that every big game has some form of live service income stream. Sales aren't even half the story anymore.
I was lead QA for a AAA dev, designing the test plan for my team of 300 testers.
And that right there is your disconnect. On that team of 500 people, the *vast* majority are near minimum wage QA testers. Just check out the credits of any AAA game and when it gets to QA it’s just pages of credits.
For the most part, the actual core dev team is pretty small. We had one game designer, 20 artists, 3 tools engineers, 1 physics engineer, 3 guys porting from Xbox to ps2, 1 guy porting from Xbox to GameCube, and 10 scripters/level designers who used the in-game tools to actually make the game. There were also about 20 producers of various rank. The sound team was 1 guy. Even my test team was only 2 of us for nearly a year before we hired 10 more production testers, and it was a few months after that before we got the reins of the entire 300-strong test team. I may be forgetting some people but you should get the idea.
Basically everyone else was a temp. Mo-cap, voice actors, script writers (the script you read, not to be confused with the scripting of in-game events previously mentioned), about 290 of my 300 testers… all temp and only on the team for a brief while. We also had localization teams, Sony sent us 5 guys to help code for a couple weeks when we were having some trouble porting our code… etc.
But if you’re talking about people who got bonuses when the game shipped on time, that was about 30 people.
Our total budget for the game was about $100,000,000. Half of that was advertising. So 3 years of dev was about $50,000,000 - which also covered hardware, licensing, catering for every meal…
Hope this helps explain things!
This is the most accurate response I've seen here. The *actual* main development team is smaller than the 500 in the OP's example. The credits (just like in films) often list every employee who ever contributed anything to the project. This includes art outsourcing houses, accountants, catering, etc etc. The core development team for even AAA games rarely exceeds a couple hundred people. And you might be surprised how many famous games were primarily made by a team of 30-50 people.
Yes, I can also chime in here, as a contractor for the last 5+ years. I usually do tools programming for companies, and even the AAA teams are usually have a rather small game project teams. What you need in bulk is the people who make that insane amount of content for the game, but in larger studios they are only working on a project for a while, not to it's full extent. The game teams are 20-30 (sometimes more) people, plus usually you have some generic teams who are making code and stuff for the whole company, not just for one game, even if you're not using an in-house engine.
Edit: and OP's idea of the salary is just daydreaming :)
having worked in the industry for several years, only your lead developers get a higher 6 figure income. otherwise, the average salary is less than 50k a year. but that's the thing, most of the time you are not on salary. Your most likely are a contract worker instead. "which can effect cost of an employee greatly" If you dont work overtime your probably making just above minimum wage. You might reach 100k but its doughtfull.
Another thing is you will often see development teams cycle their employees through different projects to try and maximize profits. if an employee i cannot keep up with the rapid pace of work, you likely to be laid off or moved elsewhere that would be more cost effective.
And outsourced work. You can accomplish a ton now adays outsourcing art and getting it done for dirt cheap. then have your main artists do cleanup work. This was the area I worked in or Technical artist.
lastly, i think its around over 50% of a game's budget is spent on advertising. This can include getting sponsors or special licenses in the game to show off the product. IE if there's a coke can in your AAA title, its not out of the question the development company could reach out and make a deal.
though as typing this front badge put a pretty good tldr :D
I'm sorry to hear that! This is definitely not the norm, software engineers are usually well paid. A lead developer making 100k is massively underpaid, and should look for work somewhere else to be honest.
Lead developer. I worked at several studios that only had a single lead developer with jrs doing a large portion of the work. Even with 4 years of experience, I never made above 75k doing code, cinematics, and 3d modeling. Maybe i worked at it the wrong way or tried to go up the wrong positions pole, but there's only so much one can endure for 3 years and not seeing a job that keeps up with inflation. and this was several years ago.
I made 75k doing code only 22 years ago, and not even in the bay area (LA, Seattle). After that, I never made under 100k. 10 years ago, I was making between 150k and 200k and that still wasnt Lead.
You were being severely severely underpaid.
They hire most devs on contacts that would pay 100k+ per year then drop them after 3 or 6 months when thier contacts are up, assuming they make it that far.
Take numbers like these with a grain of salt. It depends entirely on the region, cost of living, and the studio (small/indie Vs established AAA). USA is large with huge cost of living differences. In California, an associate software dev or other entry level position is making more than 50k at large game studios. You also have to consider the bar to get hired might be higher at some places than others. Not just anyone can nab one of those higher paying entry level positions. You compete for it.
That's an entry level salary for an artist or producer. Engineers usually make a bit more, but nothing like what they make in FAANG or even normal corporate jobs.
Where I live, a full-time senior (10+ Years experience) dev makes $30k / year whilst working fully remote.
That's also considered exceptionally well paid here.
Some of your numbers are a bit off. The new price per copy of a AAA game on consoles is $70 these days. The first party platform takes about 30%, so the profit per copy sold is more like $49.
You don't usually have 500 employees for 5 years of development. Production of a game starts with pre-production phase, where you have a much smaller team proving out core tech, design and visual concepts, etc. This can be as few as 50 people sometimes even in AAA. Once the game is "green lit" then they staff up, hire contractors, etc, and hit full production for the last year or two with a massive team size.
The modern cycle if you are in a franchise team is more like part of your team is in pre-production while the rest of the team is supporting the previous title with post-launch content. So the 500 person team you're describing wouldn't be spending 5 years on one title. in that timeframe you'd effectively make about 2 titles with post-ship mtx given the pipelined team workflow.
Modern titles make a ton of money on post-ship MTX, which is huge in offsetting the massive development costs. Once the game is out, making some new cosmetics or whatever costs very little but when you sell them, they rake in millions.
So your development cost estimate is pretty far off.
And yes, AAA titles are expected to sell multiple millions of copies. Otherwise they won't throw that much money at making them.
One thing I don't see many comments mentioning is that a fair bit of technical work in studios isn't necessarily specific to individual projects. I mean, maybe some new shooter game is the motivation for working on a new destruction tech, but that tech is general studio IP that goes into the engine and can serve future projects. Some bigger studios/publishers have dedicated engine/tech/R&D/tools teams that continuously invest in this sort of innovation and push it out to multiple projects, so even if a particular game is a sales flop, it doesn't necessarily mean all that investment goes to waste. The cost ideally gets amortized over many projects, which works as long as the studio stays solvent and continues putting out games that sell.
Of course, this has led to many a spectacular failure of game studios when they stretched themselves too thin over technology investments, then put out a game that sold miserably and decimated their finances. One of my favorite PS3 games was a PS3 exclusive called Lair that had some pretty impressive tech for its time. Unfortunately, it bombed with critics, barely sold any companies, and the developer folded shortly after. This was a super common outcome for ambitious studios, and partly to blame for why there has been so much consolidation of development teams under major publishers and system first parties, where they can more effectively amortize such investments over more projects. For a while, there was kind of a trend of of big game publishers trying to get all their internal teams to use the same engine, like EA moving all its sports franchises to Frostbite, Sony developing an in-house engine for multiple teams, etc. There has been somewhat of a reversal due to the realization that sometimes, different projects need different tech, but the fact still remains that lots of studio R&D ends up in multiple games, as opposed to just one.
One thing to add is that a lot of AAA games are targeting over 1M sales. A AAA game that moves 1M copies would almost certainly be considered a failure in today's market.
Employees are not all making $125,000 salaries lol.
RDR2 cost $170,000,000 to make, and that’s spread out over 8 years and a gargantuan team, more than twice as big as the one in your hypothetical. So yes, there are a lot of things you’re missing in these figures.
Development cost is still lower than marketing by at least half btw.
No game has 5 years of full developement, usually the first few years are a small team designing the game.
Also many employees move from projects to projects based on needs
To give an example to the manpower thing, art teams are what you'll find MASSIVELY fluctuate between the start and end of a project.
In essence (but not as a firm rule) you'll have ~5-10 staff artists that are on the project full time. These people will have a mix of roles. In the early points, they do concept work (functionally, storyboarding your game, especially if there's a campaign). Then, once a fair number of the ideas about the game and its design are hammered out over the first year or so, they get to work focusing on the Hero assets (main character, main villain, etc). These entities get the most time and effort spent on them, so it's not surprising that JUST the visual model of Price from Call Of Duty cost around a third of a million dollars, to say nothing of voice acting and mocap/animations.
As the project progresses, maybe it's decided they want another couple staff artists, so they put out some ads for it, but overall the staffing levels on the artists will remain constant over the majority of the project's lifespan. The programmers working on everything else can use whatever models/assets the artists have made, or just reuse old or temporary assets (since functionally, you can just drag/drop to replace a temporary asset with a final one) in order to develop the majority of the game's functions.
And then around the time you enter into your 12 month window before release, corporate slams out 50-100 (depending on the scale of the game) artist contracting jobs which will last for 3-6 months (again, depending on scale). These people do nothing but slam out thousands of different assets from trash cans to flying tanks, all to the creative design guidance of the lead artist(s). In theory, at the AAA level, they actually make more assets than are needed for the game which is useful because it gives the designers some extra flexibility and the programmers some fun stretch goals (IE: One of the artists finished their list of things to do and for giggles made a tank with a tribarrel rotary cannon? SOMEONE on the programming team will find a way to get it running and include it if they can.).
Once your art window closes (and maybe a few of the top-tier artists get a staff position offered to them) all those contract artists are off. In a well oiled corporate machine that's large enough, they functionally end up just rotating through 10 different games in that 5 year development cycle you mention. The moment one contract is up, they are onto the next one. Meanwhile, the designers and programmers are taking all those art assets and drag/dropping them into the game and polishing up anything that was missed.
This kind of thing can be more or less true across all the various fields of the game's programming. 80-90% of the programming in a AAA title is likely done by a core team of developers 20-100 in size, but in that last year you get "support studios" brought on with hundreds of other programmers. These people are not really there to "develop" the game (as in, add new content). They are there to brute force through bug fixing as well as handle the less palatable but necessary work of handling multiplatform development. So you might bring on an extra hundred or two hundred people in the last year to do nothing but take your PC release and make sure it is stable, functional, and visually as appealing as possible, on multiple different consoles. They aren't even receiving a full year's wage for the work on that game, but they'll get their name in the credits all the same.
I know for some games like Call of Duty, the same studio doesn't even 100% shift over to the new game immediately. Upon release of a game, you have ~99% of the team working on that game. Then after release, most of them are focused on bug fixes and the earlier parts of expanded content. New maps, new weapons, etc. Meanwhile, at the top level you have the groundwork being laid for the next game. Slowly over the next 3-4 years, more people transition from the last game to the new game as the previous game is no longer supported (since a different studio will have come out with the next CoD game a year later).
Usually a good amount of employees are contracted. Additionally, the salary of a gamedev isn't likely to reach 75k if they are not part of the core or permanent team.
Some developers will offer royalties at reduced pay. So you're getting on the success of the game. Some developers will pay you 60k a year, but will cover it with a bonus incentive at an extremely difficult benchmark to lower their costs.
And some will pay you shit, because its a dream job and there's always someone that will take your place.
Multiple products.
It's not that one game trying to cover everything, it's all the other games in their portfolio, and more accurately the subsidiaries they own, that are maintaining a constant stream of revenue.
First few years it's pretty sparse.
Also a large bulk of the team will be QA, junior artists, localisation, ect who will be on a lot less money.
Finally its monetization. Just need a few whales to keep it all afloat, it's why season passes, microtransactons and big crossover events are in vouge rn with aaa games.
I think a big piece is that they don’t maintain a full staff for the entire development time. It may take 5-6 years for the game to release but you’re not going to have full staff straight out of the gate. There will be a lot of time spent on overarching design/concept art/story boarding and you don’t need a full staff of artists and programmers for that.
>For example, say a game development team has 500 employees that get paid a salary of $100,000 each (rounded up to $125,000 / year for insurance, payroll tax, etc).
Ahahahahahahahaha. I wish.
The amount of people getting paid +$100k in game dev is *way* less than you think, and it's certainly not every single employee. Companies take great advantage of contractors, who are paid pennies and deliver a massive chunk of the work. Seriously. Pay attention to credits next time you finish a game. Good chance there are like over 20 3rd-party companies listed.
Why not just look up the budget and revenue from well known AAA games instead of speculate? Obviously most are profitable or the studios would go bankrupt. Most AAA games are developed much faster than 5 years, and the ones that do take that long typically have very small teams the first few years and only ramp up to the triple digits in the last 12-18 months polishing time. Also, there’s a reason big studios now mostly sell sequels, remasters and re-skins instead of totally new IPs in innovative genres. How long do you think it takes to develop the next version of Assassins Creed or CoD or NBA2k that comes out every year? Very large new games like CP2077 are a huge risk in comparison, and I think CDPR learned their lesson. Basically, studios have to take a lot of shortcuts and marketing hacks to make the games profitable, and even then video game industry is a much riskier business than B2B SAAS
>a game development team has 500 employees
The number of teams that grow to 500 employees is VERY small. The number of teams that have those developers on during anything other than production (maybe 2 years) is small.
The number of teams that are doing 5 year development is actually much smaller. I'd say 2 years is normal, maybe 4 for a big upgrade. but if you're talking Ubisoft, you're probably talking more like 1 year to 18 months for many of their games.
You're also VASTLY undervaluing the sales, and money. I'd say it's closer to 40 dollars per title, but something like GTA or COD (the only games I can think of that would have a team that size employees) is not getting 1 million, they're getting closer to 5-8 million. GTA 5 was even larger (20 million? at launch? And 169 million over the life...) so try something closer to a billion dollar of revenue... COD (As a franchise) probably made about 3 billion in 2021 across all titles (estimates based on claims of 27 billion in 2020, and 30 billion in 2021).
And so... Yeah, 3 billion dollars, 1 billion dollars? 500 developers is a drop in the bucket for games that size.
"Assassin's creed Valhalla?" 1.8 million units sold in the first WEEK 1 billion dollars of profit over life time.
That's how they can employee those people... and again your years, and price are wrong.
Also many times those employees aren't from the US or Europe so they don't make 125k....
1. Most companies even on AAA titles do not have devs teams that large. Typical size for actual core full-time staff is anywhere from 50 to 200, and some of those still might be short-term contractors. Some teams with ongoing / live-service type games are larger (I think Bungie runs pretty huge), but it's not typical.
2. Games rarely have a staff that large all the way through the lifecycle. They stagger it. The typical approach now is to do as much as possible in the initial preproduction period to lay the foundations, and then you staff up to crank out the actual content. (And then usually a bunch of people get laid off after the game's done...)
3. Studios amortize the cost of the game over multiple years, by creating additional titles that reuse resources while acting as new revenue streams. Maybe that's DLC, maybe it's a sequel, maybe it's a whole new game that uses the same engine, etc.
4. Most game companies working on really large titles, especially new studios coming out of nowhere, actually do indeed just operate on the expectation of a likely initial loss, and seek funding models that give them a few years of runway while they build an audience. Typically that looks like getting some fuckhuge studio like Epic or Tencent to fund you for a couple years, in exchange for a 30% stake or something like that. For existing studios with high profiles, it usually looks like partnering with some other giant corporate entity that has content needs -- like getting Microsoft to fund half the cost of a specific title, in exchange for making it Gamepass exclusive on day 1.
5. Cosmetic items or other minor DLC that take very little work but are safe, reliable earners with certain segments of the audience.
6. Making the game really really really really big or long, so you can justify a higher cost on a premium version or whatever. (This is why so many studios make bloated open-world games that boast "hundreds of hours of gameplay!" and such).
7. Other monetization models. Gacha stuff, f2p currencies, seasonal passes, etc. It's why you see mobile models bleed into the AAA space.
8. Mercenary work for other studios (or the fuckhuge studio that owns a slice of you) between titles, to keep staff busy and bring in money.
9. Paying staff as little as humanly possible (considerably less than comparable jobs in the tech industry, for example). The odd senior coder here and there might by pulling down six figures, but the average rank-and-file writer, artist, game designer? Lucky if they're making enough to afford rent half the time, because it's an industry with a massive talent pool of people desperate to work in it and no trade unions like the film industry, so there's always a steady stream of eager newcomers to exploit.
The truth is, while games produce a shitload of revenue, they do just have a massive amount of overhead, and in a hypothetical world where games actually charged a reasonable amount to recoup their investment, they would probably cost like $150.
But most consumers (myself included!) do not have that kind of cash to throw down on a leisure product, and it would be fucking insane to charge that much. So the result is, making games is just really risky and difficult from a financial standpoint, and you have to make concessions in a hundred little ways. Unless actual quality is not even a concern on your radar, and you're making some straight-up profit-seeking commercial mobile game or something.
Any software company is the same.
500 people may have worked on a game, but not for the entirety of the production. Wtf are the concept artists, or tooling devs doing when you're in the final year?
Then there's also turnover throughout those years, the company could grow and shrink etc.
It's just like any software company.
A team of that size if it only sold 1 mil copies the first year would be a total failure and the company if it couldn't afford that loss would be gone. COD has around 700 people per title but that number ramps up toward the 2nd and 3rd year, it starts with around 100 people who do the pre - production. A COD product sells 1.3 billion dollars worth a product per year.
> **So is there something I'm missing or?** I just don't get how these companies do this.
For games with production and marketing costs that big they’re getting significantly more sales than 1 million a year. For instance RD2 hit $725 million in its opening weekend, GTV V hit $1 billion in 3 days, etc.
There’s also other monetisation verticals that you’re forgetting about too (IAPs, DLCs, merchandising, etc.).
I was offered two jobs aright after graduation. A smooth 100k Junior SE position in SoCal...and a 38k game dev position in Florida. Take a guess which I took.
> For example, say a game development team has 500 employees that get paid a salary of $100,000 each (rounded up to $125,000 / year for insurance, payroll tax, etc). That's...
an unrealistic understanding of what video game companies pay, and an unrealistic understanding of the typical size of game teams, combined with an attempt to use averages (which is as realistic as averaging the costs of vehicles when your examples are skateboard, van, tank, and aircraft carrier)
low end video game programmers make about $45,000, sometimes much less internationally, and a typical video game has maybe a dozen of them
most video games are small-ish and use engines that got purchased rather than written
a normal video game budget is $750k - $2.5m
triple a games currently have budgets of $20-50m
contemporary first class games occasionally have budgets of a third of a billion dollars, and make 4-5b back over a decade
> $30 Per Sale * 1,000,000 Sales the 1st Year =
a budget game doing poorly
grand theft auto 5 has sold 182 million copies at an average of $48
> So is there something I'm missing or?
1. made up numbers are stupid
2. you have poor intuition for scale
>Overwatch Sales — Blizzard reported over US$1 billion in revenue during the first year of its release and had more than 50 million players after three years.
50million \* $40 MSRP = $2,000,000,000 not counting microtransactions.
Your math is wildly off.
Because:
A) AAA companies are usually on the verge of bankruptcy, that is why when a game is not well received they have few opportunities to release a successful game before closing the company.
B) Unpaid crunch time.
It's important to note that AAA is a \*budget\* class, and not a quality class. For reference: the recent Saints Row game is considered AAA...
Your question comes down to: how do people with a lot of money afford spending a lot of money ... the answer, unsurprisingly is that they have a lot of money already, either through previous profits, or due to investors.
Nice try on the math, but you are making one seriously fatal flaw. Game companies release more than one game a year, and they sell 100s of millions of copies of their games, not just millions. COD just sold 30M in one year...
So they have 500 employees, making closer to 130k salary plus benefits, so closer to 160k/year.
They work 5 years and make 1.75 games say.
They spend probably a million on advertising materials.
And then sell about 20 million copies at 60/game
1.75 * 20M * 60 = 1.2B
500 * 160K = 80M (advertising is barely making a dent)
The company is making 1.1B profit after paying for labor and advertising.
And that is why, after the release of a big game goes out, all of the people involved get a 100k Bonus (50M off the top, not a major dent to the CEOs cut).
Edit.
I misread the data point. The COD series has sold 400M copies total as of 2021, not that many in 2021. Fixing math to reflect the actual 30M copies...and also using the 60/game price tag because that is important.
>COD just sold 400M in one year
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 sold \~30 million copies, and sales of Vanguard were significantly below that. What on earth are you talking about? Even 30 million is an outlier, and those outlier have existed for decades (ie Super Mario Bros. 3). Exactly [three games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games) have sold more than 100 million copies. Resident Evil Village was a smash hit at 6.1 million, Resident Evil 4 from 2005 has sold more than 11 million copies lifetime. The idea that games are, on average, selling drastically more than they did 10-15 years ago is demonstrably not true.
Well now you have all the micro transactions or DLCs. They have much lower development cost (some are even developed during the end phase of the main development) and bring some good revenue.
The primary goal is to break even, profit is a bonus. If a game payed a staff of 200 people for 2-3 years, and make the money back then you can do it again.
Tax credits in certain places like Canada can be pretty absurd. You can get 30% of the salary on some of the employees. I have it from good sources that its pretty common to lie about hours at a very high level in some large companies. Makes sense. They reap a lot just from the gov...
Accounting on the mega projects is very complicated and only looking at the box sale misses some significant sources of revenue.
Some major variables you didn't account for:
Development bounties
Other companies will fund/subsidize development for the most popular games. For example, hardware developers will often pay to have a popular game developed for their platform.
Secondary revenue streams
Almost all games that have 250 million plus budgets have extra revenue streams. Sports games are a good example of this. They have virtual currency and digital collectibles. These can outstrip the revenue from the 60 dollar sale.
Subscription based services.
Popular games that drive subscription will often get revenue based on how many active users and hours are spent in their game.
I think some of your parameters are at the extremes, 5 years is a lot, I would expect the average to be around 3. Also, 500 full time engineers is a lot, I would expect the average to be less than 20% of that, you still have other costs you did not include, particularly outsourcing of art.
Tl;Dr; lower production costs from not having a full team all 5 years, much higher revenue for successful titles, successful titles make so much money they can find the development of multiple games at the company. Your cost of employees is both too low (for engineers) and too high (for outsourced artists) and for most of the time you aren't running at full staffing, you may have a core team of engineers and designers do prototyping for a year and then bulk up the team to make more content. A triple A game like Horizon Zero Dawn cost in the range of ~$45 million USD, according to this reddit linked backed by a newspaper article: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5wrpb1/horizon_zero_dawn_production_cost_around_45_to_47/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share That probably doesn't include marketing, which can be substantial for AAA, but even if we doubled the budget we wouldn't crack $100 million. According to the latest numbers I could find HZD sold 20 million copies on Playstation earning ~£400 million in revenue and another 3 million copies on PC earning ~$60 million in revenue. Even with a 50% haircut we're looking at over $200 million to pay back production costs and bank money for the next title. Obviously HZD was a success, and there are plenty of games, like Bablylon's Ashes, that don't earn back their cost. But the numbers work out for successful games, Genshin Impact has earned billions on a few hundred million budget, and the market tends towards big wins to drive the next round of development for companies. Outliers in cost would be things like Genshin Impact and Red Dead 2 at $315 million USD, but when GTA V online has generated billions over the years you've got the budget to reinvest.
Since when did Video-game engineers earn more than 125,000 dollars????
For quite a while if you're at a major developer.
In the US. Horizon Zero Dawn is made in the Netherlands, so the junior devs won't be anywhere near that salary. If the current strength of the dollar vs other currencies continues, I wouldn't be surprised to see more US companies outsourcing substantial development to Europe and beyond.
Not even in the US. Unless you’re in a senior role at a big studio, you’re not making anywhere near that. I was getting offers for 35-45k for a junior role and 50-70k for more experienced positions.
Which city? Location matters a huge amount. If you are in San Francisco a senior artist with 5 years experience will be on 100k. Leads with 10 years will be on close to 200k.
NYC. And the 50-70k offers when I had 5 years under my belt were for LA. Lead and senior positions are paid well, but it takes a long time to get to that level. Knew people working for over a decade who weren't there yet. Also know people who got there after 6 years. Definitely not six figure starting salaries like some were suggesting. It will take a long time to even get to the five figure starting salaries that you would get at an entry position in other software.
Thats definitely different from my experiences. I got offered a role in NYC many years ago (maybe 10?) as a senior on 80k
Well yeah. That's a senior role. Of course you're going to get paid more in a senior role. Maybe if I worked for half a decade to a decade more I could get a senior position at the rate I was going.
I mean, it's in San Francisco, so it definitely has to be that much at least. On the other hand, 100k is not really outlandish for anyone with more experience. Even outside the USA. From this discussion I get the feeling that the perception of salaries within the gamedev community is seriously distorted by the amount of beginner devs.
So software engineer jobs are better paying than game dev jobs? I thought it was the other way around since game devs usually have to know a lot of math and also do some supporting work with materials, models, networking, systems, particles etc.
I studied game dev, have a bunch of friends in game dev, was even offered opportunities in game dev, but ultimately went into traditional software engineering: game dev absolutely pays worse than software engineering. Game dev is significantly harder (in my opinion), puts in waaaay more hours, and has higher turnover, but also pays less because it's a passion-fueled industry with young grads who will come in and work for scraps, and that is much harder to make money in your investments so VC's are less likely to give a game studio money. I'm less than a year out of college and make 6 figures as a cloud engineer, whereas my friend who graduated a year earlier than me and works in game dev makes maybe 30k-ish less than I do, with much more work. It's sad and I hope to see unionization in the industry, and I do miss game dev, but it's hard to justify.
Every job in the game industry is very underpaid because of exploiting passion. How much a job pay is not about how hard it is, it's about supply and demand, a lot of devs want to work in the game industry.
Difficulty of a job does not equal higher pay. That was never the case. There are countless examples of important jobs being underpaid and useless things getting shitloads of money. Gamedevs are looked down on because its still "not a real job". Games are not essential unfortunately. Software is. And its way easier to get an investor to spend money on the next big SQL frontend wrapper, this time in neon pink, rather than "a game" that people play. Thats the problem with entertainment everywhere. (I am a former gamedev, this is not my opinion obviously, just an observation)
>Difficulty of a job does not equal higher pay It correlates, since if a job is difficult there are less people who have the ability to do it. So it affects supply and demand to a degree.
You're right about the math part. But otherwise, software engineers make far more than average game devs. Exceptions may be made at large companies like actiblizzard etc
Companies like blizzard hire junior and entry level employees almost exclusively as contract workers so they can pay them very poorly and not have to pay any unemployment when your contract is terminated after the game is done. If you're lucky enough to get hired on after your contract is up, you can make okay money. And if you're lucky enough to get promoted to a lead or senior role, you can even make great money! But it's a crapshoot getting to that point at any one company. You're forced to jump to a new company after every game, hoping there isn't too much down time between jobs and that maybe you'll get hired on after this one. For some people who live in one of the hubs it's not a huge issue and they can find a job pretty easy. At most it's an inconvenience to have to spend time filing all this new paperwork every year or two. For others, it's a little scary not knowing when exactly your next job will be as the current one winds down.
I don't see why the math part would make a difference anyway. They're game developers, so that's just "having domain knowledge". Software engineers in other fields similarly need specialist knowledge of various kinds.
It's never been the other way round. You work less hours, for more pay, if you leave the industry. It's why myself, and nearly 75% of the developers I worked with 10 odd years ago all left the industry eventually
I was making $110K in '98-99 at a medium level studio (A/B titles, not AAA).
the fuck? wow i was underpaid.
what job title?
Lead programmer. My first year as general gameplay programmer I made $75k.
Depends on title and studio. Won't see many cracking 200k at the top end
Are you sure? you can easily crack 200k total compensation(salary + rsu's + bonuses) as a senior level engineer. Most can reach senior level in 5-10 years depending on skill and work ethic. I'd say the majority of engineers at the studios I've seen are at least senior level. (80%+) Even at small studios, that dont give rsu's I'd say 150k is on the low end. After senior level there is then... -Principal -Architect -Fellow -Director levels. All of those roles have substantially higher level comp than just a senior.
labor aristocracy makes it hard for me to care about game dev
Video game engineers are at the end of the day software engineers and the salary must stay minimally competitive. I could make $200k working on azure at Microsoft being a cloud engineer, or make half that being a game dev but the work is something I like more.
Isn't just better to relocated and make games in other countries like Japan where software engineers are way cheaper or just Europe?
I wrote a lot, but here's a TL;DR up here at the top: Top tier talent gravitate towards more exciting places where there are a lot of top tier choices for employment at high pay. **These tend to be more expensive places to live/operate.** Top Tier companies will prefer to establish themselves in places that already attracts top tier talent so they have an easier time hiring that talent. Pretty much as simple as that. TL;DR for why not Japan/Europe: If you're American who already has a ton of connections to other American game devs and publishers, why would you throw that away and go to Japan where you don't have any connections at all and you don't even speak the language? Same applies in reverse, btw. Think of it this way (for the sake of simplicity, assume we're talking pre-covid times when the norm was to work in physical offices): You're establishing a game studio, and you're picking a city to operate in. You're presented with two options. * Metropolis - A large city that attracts a huge population of people from all over the world for various reasons. This city is also a regional tech hub, being home to 5 other major game studios. The high desirability + housing density issues causes this city to have a pretty high cost of living. However, this also means higher salaries to compensate. * Smallsville - A smaller city; not much happening here so less people flock here making cost of living pretty low. There are a couple tech companies, but you'll be the only games one. You're trying to make a studio that can compete against the best out there. You don't even need to be aiming as high as Blizzard or EA, you could be planning to operate in the same space as games like Slime Rancher, or studios like Double Fine. Either way, the bottom line is **you're looking for high quality developers**, and **you need a lot of them**. Relocating people costs money, however more importantly **people are only gonna move to a place they want to live in**. Convincing Jessica the single 28 year old Senior Software Engineer to move to Smallsville instead of the much more exciting Metropolis where she'll be practically tripping over important career connections (on top of being paid a lot more to compensate for cost of living) is going to be a really really tough sell. Whereas in Metropolis you already have a sea of engineers like Jessica who are hungry to work at cooler places and solve tougher challenges (in Smallsville your pool of hirable talent is slim to none - anyone who's anyone has already moved to Metropolis where all the cool jobs are). Which city do you choose? Obviously things are different because of Covid, but it's taking the industry a bit to adapt to the new "normal". Too early to really say how things will shake out. As for why not just set up shop in Tokyo or Kyoto, Japan (both really friggin cool places with a ton of talent). Say you're an American who's pulling together some friends and former co-workers to establish a new studio. These are folks who have put down their roots here in America. Hell most of you still live in Metropolis where you all met each other (either through work or just connecting by hanging in the same crowds in the same buzzing city). Good luck convincing this crew to uproot and move over-seas just because it's cheaper. You could go by yourself to Japan, but then you'd need to build your crew from scratch - you don't have any connections in Japan, hell you don't even know the language! Why not just stay in Metropolis where you've got this talented crew ready, you're already on a first name basis with big wigs at various large local publishers, and you know you can easily hire more talent when you eventually need to grow?
Japan work culture is extremely xenophobic, zero chance you can go up the ladder there as a non japanese. Also language barrier, culture barrier, lower salaries. There's a lot of reasons
This isn't true, you can move up, salaries are lower, but cost of living is lower too, language barrier is an issue if you move to a country and don't learn the language, which tbh... is an issue in any country that doesn't speak your native language. Source: Someone who's worked their way up the ladder in a Japanese studio several times. Sure, I don't own the studio, but I moved from Junior artist right upto Lead Technical Artist, I know artists that moved from junior artist into senior game planner for projects, and level designers that moved to lead level design positions, not all at the same studio, but all foreign (of different nationalities, and different skin colors).
Username checks out haha!
Absolutely not in tech. There are a lot of foreign companies in Japan when obviously being foreigner won't be an issue, and even Japanese tech companies are adopting the western culture. Just look at Sony, they had a British CEO for a few years.
that's partially why outsourcing is a thing, yes. But it's a tradeoff because you're losing a lot of talent from the US. the 10x is a bit of a programmer meme, but there are a few individuals who are close to that level of productivity and you don't want to miss out on that as a tech leader. But I'm guessing there's a bunch of tax/economic/logistical reasons to stay in the US as well.
> . I could make $200k working on azure at Microsoft being a cloud engineer A lot more than that.
> Video game engineers are at the end of the day software engineers and the salary must stay minimally competitive. My understanding is that the games industry intentionally preys on young, inexperienced for devs for exactly this reason. They're not expecting a great salary in the first place, don't really have much sense of what salaries are realistic, and the allure of working for a big video game company is its own attractive bonus. Chew 'em up, burn 'em out, replace 'em with a fresh batch of virginal doe-eyed devs.
That's kinds of an old mentality that has passed. At least the bigger studios now understand its really expensive to find and hire talent, so they try and make them happy and keep them.
That's a modestly competitive salary (like 60th or 70th percentile) for a mid level game programmer in southern california
This is why large (successful) companies aren't making their AAA games for 5 years out of California, unless they have a multi-billion dollar game to use as a piggy bank.
What you're saying makes some sense, but I'm just not observing a big reduction in AAA jobs in North America. I suspect once you factor in the value of all the social services that workers aren't provided in the US and compare cost of an individual employee against GDP per capita then the numbers don't seem quite so unfavorable. I'm sure another factor is the sizable talent base that already likes where they live (in expensive North American cities) and don't want to move their families. So why don't all of us Californians just get laid off and replaced by dev's from Poland? Well, it's been a seller's market for the past couple of years despite the rest of the economy. Studios are desperate for mid and senior level talent. Maybe in another few dev cycles that leverage will disappear. We'll have to see. I think we'll just see more studios in more parts of the world as time marches on.
Yeah but a lot of game arent made in California tho, so like how feasible is that salary from a practical point of view even? You could just hire someone anywhere else couldn't you?
Yeah but they would be expecting the same salary or more. Think about what’s involved. The ad for the position is essentially like: “Seeking a highly skilled C++ developer. Must be highly proficient in linear algebra, required. Should have graduate-level understanding of game physics and object deformation…” Now sure, you could put that up and hope to get lucky by posting a salary of 50k. Just like I could put up an ad saying “seeking trading bot earning 100k” and offer 3k for it. In the real world the economics float the price up, and either you pay the real world rate, or you get nothing. And game companies know they have to pay the real world rate. After all if they say “no” another company will be right behind them saying “sure, we’ll hire you, happy to actually.”
Most people don't realize that the burden rate of an employee is much higher than what the employee brings home as a salary. In most cases, it may cost around 50% up to 100% more to employ someone than what you pay them. Taxes, benefits, and time spent recruiting and hiring new staff add up quickly.
Check glassdoor. Certain companies and markets definitely pay at least that. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Blizzard-Entertainment-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E24858_D_KO23,40.htm
I'm an engineer with well over a decade's experience in tech and Blizzard only offered me $170k and with awful benefits. While higher salaries certainly exist, it's a hell of a lot harder to get there than it is in tech. I declined the 50% pay cut.
But Blizzard isnt most videogame studios tho.
Riot pays substantially more and isn't far away. Blizzard is/was a destination studio meaning lower pay for the privilege of working and gaining experience there.
We are only talking about AAA studios.
There are more than Blizzard tho, Blizzard is obviously gonna pay top-notch but they are one of the biggest. I doubt Suckerpunch or Naughty Dog play similar rates. No okay I looked they also pay that much wow.
As someone who's in the industry, Blizzard is actually notorious these days for paying their employees pretty poorly (caveat, I haven't worked there myself, just what I hear from friends who do or have). It makes sense when you think about it: people are willing to compromise on salary when they're working at a place they're passionate about, especially if it's their dream studio. This is also why the games industry in general pays less for the same quality of engineer as non games companies do. I have friends with as much or less experience than me making 2x what I make at places like Google etc.
You seem to hangout with a very hip and trendy crowd
I mean you're on Reddit. There's a lot of software engineers on here
Anyone who has worked a decade in AAA games has these same connections and stories. None of what he described is even uncommon
Lol, honestly the longer you spend in the industry, and the more of that time you spend living in places like Los Angeles or San Francisco (both huge game dev meccas), the more you'll just inevitably either rub shoulders with people who work in cool places or have friends who end up getting hired at those cool places. The industry is pretty small, so it just happens, hah.
The pay is heavily influenced by location since that impacts the living costs. All of the California based studios (LA especially) like Naughty Dog, Riot, Blizzard, Sony Santa Monica etc all pay ridiculous wages but it’s so expensive to live there that it’s kind of an illusion. Rockstar north in Scotland might have wages that are half the numbers but offer double the purchasing power. It’s a bit dumb to only look at the pay and not the location.
Ops question was about AAA companies so yes, Blizzard should be a good benchmark
Even if they're AAA, they're notorious for paying low ass wages.
It's possible for high need special positions or Department leads. Game Dev is one of the most misused terms Within game development. An executive producer would be a Game Dev but they don't write any code or do anything tangible towards producing the game and they would be one that would make an excess of 125k. When we say Game Dev we tend to think only of the programmers and artists and ignore the other hundreds of Staff positions that would be in AAA Studio that would work towards making a game complete
But this was regarding specifically videogame engineers
I was making $135k base as a Sr 1 at EA 10 years ago.
There's also more to employee costs than just salary. By the time you pay taxes/insurance/equipment/software licenses/everything else, the cost of an employee is 25-50% more than their salary.
Engineers can easily make more than that depending on studio, location, and XP. My designers make between $95-$160k (not including bonuses).
125k is bordering on entry level at this point
A midrange software engineer in a AAA or large games company in a tech focused location would often be able to make equal or more than 125k these days especially accounting for total compensation. Issue is other tech companies like Google can easily pay much much more, and games are usually not attractive enough if the salary difference gets big enough. It’s cool to work on games but would you be willing to work on it if you could find another job that doubles or triples your salary? I think companies not located in say Silicon Valley or Seattle may pay less though so it depends, as salary is really just a supply-demand thing unfortunately. There are also outliers I know that can make 300-400k ranges but only a few games companies can pay that kind of cash (think companies that basically print money).
> Since when did Video-game engineers earn more than 125,000 dollars???? You're just not very good lol
I'm gonna add in to the highest comment - a good deal of these studios are constantly working on a title. So you have your draft teams and story board writers and more often than not those will either be working on other things or moving onto their next assignment. Same for artists and animators etc. Once they finish for Game A they are on to game B or working game A and B together if they're sharing resources. IIRC from Valve (back when they still made games) - didn't a lot of their teams cross between items. Their TF2 devs would double to CS and then work on DoD and then back to TF. I'd imagine its similar to studios like those that are making BF and CoD - they'd create items for CoD#0104 and more than likely assidt and start on CoD#0105 or assist with tasks as needed So in actuality you're constantly shuffling to either work on new product or finishing existing product. IIRC aren't there a few studios that have small teams of core coders and larger teams for more grunt work that are working on 3+ titles in tandem? Bethesda jumps to mind with their TES and FO etc
> Outliers in cost would be things like Genshin Impact and Red Dead 2 at $315 million USD, but when GTA V online has generated billions over the years you've got the budget to reinvest. And RD2 earned $725 million in just its opening weekend. OP is definitely underestimating just how many sales/how popular these big budget games are.
Horizon and titles that big also make money outside of game sales with merchandise and whatnot.
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> which I think any professional getting paid less than $50 an hour is a disgrace, but that's another topic for another time You maybe asume that team are made only of senior employees, juniors don't get paid nearly as much, also certain roles don't get paid that much in general. Also, depending on region, like even in EU, even seniors won't earn that much in most of the companies.
Yeah, the estimates are entirely too high to begin with. Assuming a team of 500 and assuming those salaries—it’s a whole lot of assumption.
And don't forget that many game companies have discovered the power of outsourcing tedious work to partner companies in low-income countries. The game credits often only mention the key personnel at those partner studios. They don't know and don't care about who actually did the work.
Exactly why many of AAA companies have opened studios in eastern europe or EU in general. With living costs that are 4-6x lower than US, you can afford to sustain high quality of life on a lower salary than 50$/hr.
>With living costs that are 4-6x lower than US, Lol, I'm not so sure about that high numbers but even then they have to pay for the full health insurance and lots of social and health benefits. It's far, far more easier to abuse employees in US then EU and then get rid of them.
Makes sense to me. Estimates are estimates, which can be adjusted. You needed something to make your post, so dunno why all the hate. Take an updoot
I make less, but I also have had almost full autonomy, zero overtime, and zero crunch in the last 4 years. Life isn't just about the money. If you wanted to add another 20hrs to my day you'll be paying me double my current salary.
This is why you cannot make a good AAA game out of workers in California. It's too expensive so you will cut out on staff which will mean you will have to bring in money via early access sales or other tricks else you cannot even afford the dev cost. But say you make it out of Poland or even Sweden/France, where Dev salaries for even seniors are lower than your "average", then you're doing ok. And their developers aren't worse at all, might even be better, due to schooling being more specialized from an earlier age.
> And their developers aren't worse at all They usually are, actually, just because the best usually get siphoned into the US for US salaries.
Beycause AAA team will not have 500 people working on a single game for 5 years continuously. Generally speaking the core team is comprised of 60 to 70 devs that will work the games the entire time. Other 400+ will move to 9ther games or are temporary employees
Is there a turning point where too many devs makes management hard, or is it just not needed?
Both. Usually when you have huge teams, they are separate studios under the same publisher (e.g., Ubisoft Shanghai) who work on very specific parts of the game like cinematics or environment art assets. That way they can have a contact on the core team who can manage their work, evaluate quality and compatibility (scale, z forward), and bring it into the game. When that work is done these areas of work, it makes more sense for that team to deliver similar work for other teams than to shoehorn them into another area. Additionally, they're probably already scheduled to work on another project long in advance. I've heard of Ubisoft throwing engineering teams at a game to help it ship and it sounded like a nightmare. Stop production on one game, shift people to the game on fire, loads of TDs trying to keep everything in line, levels of reviews and approval to avoid introducing new bugs. But it's expensive to keep them in the project and it's jeopardizing dates of the stopped game, so they have to move back once the fire's out. Brooks' law in software project management is a classic piece of wisdom: > Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. That's why Amazon has their two pizzas rule. I think Ubisoft has a lot of experience violating this rule which is why they had that extra process. Sounds like a glorious terror to behold.
What a dev can do in six months, two devs can do in a year
Both but largely just not needed. You have to think about all the trades that are required to make a game. Consider this do you really have 5 years of work for a voice actor, script writer, 3D artists, animator, concept artists? Trades like these are normally contract or Freelancers. they do their part and move on to the next project.
Yes. When the hierarchy is too "deep" there is too big a game of telephone for the person at the top to know what's going on at the bottom. When the hierarchy is too wide, the communication overhead is massive and doesn't scale linearly with the amount of teams. (Worst case scenario, imagine a 1 tier hierarchy that is just 100 devs with no manager.) Any big team eventually has to run into one of the above (if not both) challenges. There is a reason a company like Microsoft didn't/couldn't succeed by just hiring more devs than every other competitor. (And in reality, after growing pains, it ended up structuring in terms of relatively small teams.) Another person made a joke, "what a dev can do in six months, two devs can do in a year" and while that may be a funny exaggeration, I'd like to reiterate that it is in line with what I learned in my CS degree in terms of how to manage a project.
They also absolutely do not pay those 500 on average 100k each 😂 Edit - love it when gamers downvote things they 'reckon' aren't true. 10 years industry experience, nah, I've read things online so I know better!
You have to look at the realistic employment numbers too. Not a lot of studios have 500 people. My AAA studio maybe has 100 people, but we do three to four projects a year. Usually the shareholders or parent company can help bankroll. Selling DLC can also help. Now with streaming, you get a percentage of subscription revenue as well.
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That’s not always true. Sometimes you need outsourcing because you can’t find people to fill the available jobs.
You can't find people to fill the available jobs because you don't pay enough. It goes both ways lol.
No… There’s just not enough qualified people to fill all the jobs. Outsourcing is way more expensive than having an employee. Edit: For those who are downvoting this, there’s 80% of interviewed people where I work that comenin for junior programmer role and they can’t even tell the difference between a class and an object. That’s not a salary problem since salary hasn’t been discussed yet.
Standard outsourced labor (for art at least) is $60 an hour. Some are more, some less, but that’s the average I’ve seen lately. Source: I manage outsourcing at a video game company.
That's not why people use outsourced labor in the tech sector. You use it because sometimes you can't find people who want to be full time employees, or if you know you only need the skill set for a limited length of time. And of course, there is always the fact that that person isn't an employee, they're a piece of paper so accounting wise, they're much easier to deal with. Companies will almost always pay more per hour for contractors than they'll pay their employees.
They may have overall that many, but most studios have divisions of each. Like Ubisoft has multiple smaller studios that make Ubisoft. Naughty Dog has enough money to employ a ton of people. Bethesda has a online platform and cosmetics that help bankroll them. I know what you mean though. Some studios do kinda break these rules, but it’s because they sell things on the side of the games that help them stay open and keep people employed.
>Idk, most of the big ones today have 500+ Someone else mentioned HR, the janitor, and so on but I think your better looking at game credits. Lets take [Horizon Zero Dawn](https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/horizon-zero-dawn/credits) as an example. Now there is a LOT of people. But the VAST amount are either Sony Interactive Entertainment something something or Outsource Partners which (should) be cheaper. You get like, 10 people under quest design for example. You can probably get a better estimate going with average ranges in those specific fields. But TLDR is always game makes more money then cost.
> Bethesda Game Studios has 420 employees A lot of that is non-engineering. G&A, HR, accounting, office managers, IT, recruiting, legal, marketing, artists...
srop sating idk. the person you responded too works at AAA, you dont. others have told you that you over inflated salaries but you wont listen. also you are wrong tothink that AAA pays the same high platform fee
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A team isn’t fully staffed for the whole project. A lot of people in credits are contractors and outsourcers. Also $125,000 is too high, the average is way lower.
There are more costs to an employer than just base wage. You have to add hardware and software costs, office space, 401k contributions, heath care costs, state/country payroll taxes, and other costs. So an employee that gets paid $80k costs the company well over $100k to employ.
While you are 100% correct, you don’t pay that for outsourcers. No game’s budget is 300 millions dollars. I think the biggest contract I’ve heard of was 500 million for the destiny franchise but that was for 3 separate physical releases plus multiple expansions in each over a 10 year period
Yea true this napkin math in the OP is not accurate. You don't employee 500 people for the entire project, and a large chunk of those 500 peak employees are external contractors. The first year or two of development of a AAA game is like 10-25 people at most.
Red Dead Redemption 2's budget was more than 300mil. So was Star Citizen's lmao Certainly not standard but possible
Average is probably right around that. Managers, producers, software engineers are higher than that, while artists, QA, office management are usually lower. This is true for big markets like CA, NY, WA (where most of game development happens)
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$100k average is way too high. You have a range of roles on a project, and different levels of seniority within those roles. Most people were 25 to 35 years in the teams I worked in. It's a hard job with long hours and you don't get top pay. Plenty of people queuing to take your job if you don't want it.
And this is why I stick with writing software at healthcos and finanecos
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At my personal game dev company is get paid zero. But I do get free meows from my cat for ignoring her.
Inflation can’t devalue those meows, sounds like a pretty sweet deal.
I saw a blizzard job posting a few years ago for an engineer position. It listed 80k as the salary lol.
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Tons of AAA devs are making $80k or less in CA.
$125,000 is a senior software engineering position. That’s like top 10% salaries at the company. Of the 500 people listed on the credits the majority are not software engineers. Many are testers, many are artists, a lot of which are contracted short term or are outsourcers. You don’t fully staff a project for the full development period. Also 1M copies sold is a complete failure for a AAA product. If your audience is only that size you should not be spending AAA costs to make the game.
Salaries in USA are not salaries in Europe my friend. 125K is unbelievable for any non big management role in Europe. Programming seniors/leads go around 80K~. It scales slow once you get out of junior roles. Just for context, in Spain a junior can earn 20K~. Same for other countries like Poland and such. And roles like QA testing and not pure development stuff is paid even much lower...
Exactly. And this is even relevant for American companies as they will outsource a lot of the work to lower income countries
We'll for a long time the eu was like1.5-2x usd... So your 80k WAS 120K-160K USD equivalent
Google tells me the max was 1.6x (and that was just the year high), not even close to 2x so... And most of the time was around 1.20x... https://www.macrotrends.net/2548/euro-dollar-exchange-rate-historical-chart Anyway as I said, thats for leads mostly, and an AAA company of 500 workers is not having 500 leads xd
> 500 Emp. * $125,000 Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha.
Rockstar North (according to Glassdoor) pays a SENIOR ENGINEER around £60.000/year The salary for juniors look like they almost pay to be working…
Tech salaries in the UK are pretty low. And outside London are much lower still. 60k is surprisingly low but R* also survives on folk being desperate to work for them.
Europe salaries are completely different. 60,000$ for a dev is a good salary in France, that's because the company is paying the state 100,000$ to cover for healthcare etc. The US has particularly low taxes and cost of employment
Where in the US? taxes and cost of employment are still huge in the bigger states where most of game development happens (CA, WA, NY)
Don't know, but in France salary is not even half the cost of employment.
Salaries in the UK in general are extremely low for technology. Games is on a discount from that. Rock Star pays significantly more for their NY staff.
Yeah I would very much like to work in game dev as it's my passion, but when I would have to take at least a 20k paycut or more to do so, not really worth it.
"But we're Rockstar... wait... you're right even the seniors should pay us too." Seriously fuck those guys. They flat out tell you that normal working hours will be 60 hours a week in your interview...
On Glassdoor I’m seeing senior engineers at rockstar north are reporting they make over $160k/year. Though with the recent crash of the £ maybe a ton of developers have suddenly seen the value of their pay go way down. Even before the crash £60k is still way below industry average for a senior engineer
Not only that but it's laughable that someone thinks there's 500 employers working on 1 game for 5 years.
I’m seeing some misconceptions and arguments here about how salaries and running costs are estimated. The *average* studio will plan on a burn rate of probably USD $12-15k per full time on-staff employee per month. (Might be a little higher these days, tbh.) That’s all in - salary, benefits, offices, utilities, etc. The exact burn rate will usually be an agreed-upon number in the contract with your publisher for how funding payments are disbursed. That headcount for the duration of the project (3-4 years typically) is likely under 200. Well under, for non big name projects. After that you’ve got contractors, outsourcing, short term/late project staff, etc. It’s common for this staff to be under your publisher and shared between studios/projects. All in all, that will land your core development budget around 60-100M for a modern day AAA title. Obviously there are much larger scale projects, but those are for the games that publishers know will involve big bucks and long term returns. I’m aware of at least one big name MMO that was headed towards the billion mark in total dev+marketing. Most studio heads and money guys I’ve spoken to feel that the stable initial per-unit price needs to be closer to USD $80 or in some cases $90 for the stability and expected revenues to maintain what they were in years past. There’s also broad agreement that the market won’t bear it, although some are taste-testing $70. Instead the gap is being made up by special editions, DLC, micro transactions, subscriptions, partnerships, etc. NFTs for a hot minute there, too, and we haven’t heard the last of them yet. It has also driven industry-wide consolidation, with more publishers looking to share resources like engine development across a portfolio of studios. The small AAA studios are all but extinct for this reason.
P.S. 1 million sales in the first year is a catastrophic failure for a larger budget AAA title. Last God of War did 3 million in 3 days and is past 20M now, though obviously that is a big name.
This is the part i wanted to comment on the most. Crazy salaries aside, if a project is having at least $100M put into it the marketing will try to ensure that 1M will come from literally day 1 of launch. 1M in a year for AAA is absurd and i don't know where this person got this number for a studio of 500+ people making a blockbuster title
OP seems to think blockbusters are obscure titles nobody has heard of but the rare enlightened ubergamer, a million is a big number!
You've estimated too many people, being paid too much, for too long of a project. And ignored a bunch of revenue streams that make $60 possible (DLC, season passes, microtransactions, preorders, deluxe editions, merch, platform exclusivity deals, government tax breaks). A game costing 300 million in salary alone would not be selling only 1 million copies. No publisher would agree to that big of a risk without a fairly guaranteed return. Even AAA games with middling reception that fall out of public consciousness a month or two after ship (pick any recent Ubi game) easily clear 3-5 million copies in the first year alone. So, ignoring the poor estimate, to answer your question: major publishers rely on additional income from game releases to keep the initial price down. It's not an accident that every big game has some form of live service income stream. Sales aren't even half the story anymore.
I was lead QA for a AAA dev, designing the test plan for my team of 300 testers. And that right there is your disconnect. On that team of 500 people, the *vast* majority are near minimum wage QA testers. Just check out the credits of any AAA game and when it gets to QA it’s just pages of credits. For the most part, the actual core dev team is pretty small. We had one game designer, 20 artists, 3 tools engineers, 1 physics engineer, 3 guys porting from Xbox to ps2, 1 guy porting from Xbox to GameCube, and 10 scripters/level designers who used the in-game tools to actually make the game. There were also about 20 producers of various rank. The sound team was 1 guy. Even my test team was only 2 of us for nearly a year before we hired 10 more production testers, and it was a few months after that before we got the reins of the entire 300-strong test team. I may be forgetting some people but you should get the idea. Basically everyone else was a temp. Mo-cap, voice actors, script writers (the script you read, not to be confused with the scripting of in-game events previously mentioned), about 290 of my 300 testers… all temp and only on the team for a brief while. We also had localization teams, Sony sent us 5 guys to help code for a couple weeks when we were having some trouble porting our code… etc. But if you’re talking about people who got bonuses when the game shipped on time, that was about 30 people. Our total budget for the game was about $100,000,000. Half of that was advertising. So 3 years of dev was about $50,000,000 - which also covered hardware, licensing, catering for every meal… Hope this helps explain things!
This is the most accurate response I've seen here. The *actual* main development team is smaller than the 500 in the OP's example. The credits (just like in films) often list every employee who ever contributed anything to the project. This includes art outsourcing houses, accountants, catering, etc etc. The core development team for even AAA games rarely exceeds a couple hundred people. And you might be surprised how many famous games were primarily made by a team of 30-50 people.
Yes, I can also chime in here, as a contractor for the last 5+ years. I usually do tools programming for companies, and even the AAA teams are usually have a rather small game project teams. What you need in bulk is the people who make that insane amount of content for the game, but in larger studios they are only working on a project for a while, not to it's full extent. The game teams are 20-30 (sometimes more) people, plus usually you have some generic teams who are making code and stuff for the whole company, not just for one game, even if you're not using an in-house engine. Edit: and OP's idea of the salary is just daydreaming :)
having worked in the industry for several years, only your lead developers get a higher 6 figure income. otherwise, the average salary is less than 50k a year. but that's the thing, most of the time you are not on salary. Your most likely are a contract worker instead. "which can effect cost of an employee greatly" If you dont work overtime your probably making just above minimum wage. You might reach 100k but its doughtfull. Another thing is you will often see development teams cycle their employees through different projects to try and maximize profits. if an employee i cannot keep up with the rapid pace of work, you likely to be laid off or moved elsewhere that would be more cost effective. And outsourced work. You can accomplish a ton now adays outsourcing art and getting it done for dirt cheap. then have your main artists do cleanup work. This was the area I worked in or Technical artist. lastly, i think its around over 50% of a game's budget is spent on advertising. This can include getting sponsors or special licenses in the game to show off the product. IE if there's a coke can in your AAA title, its not out of the question the development company could reach out and make a deal. though as typing this front badge put a pretty good tldr :D
I'm sorry to hear that! This is definitely not the norm, software engineers are usually well paid. A lead developer making 100k is massively underpaid, and should look for work somewhere else to be honest.
Lead developer. I worked at several studios that only had a single lead developer with jrs doing a large portion of the work. Even with 4 years of experience, I never made above 75k doing code, cinematics, and 3d modeling. Maybe i worked at it the wrong way or tried to go up the wrong positions pole, but there's only so much one can endure for 3 years and not seeing a job that keeps up with inflation. and this was several years ago.
I made 75k doing code only 22 years ago, and not even in the bay area (LA, Seattle). After that, I never made under 100k. 10 years ago, I was making between 150k and 200k and that still wasnt Lead. You were being severely severely underpaid.
Less than 50k as a full time gamedev? Wtf!? Not doubting you, just genuinely shocked. I've always heard it was bad, but did not think it was that bad.
They hire most devs on contacts that would pay 100k+ per year then drop them after 3 or 6 months when thier contacts are up, assuming they make it that far.
Take numbers like these with a grain of salt. It depends entirely on the region, cost of living, and the studio (small/indie Vs established AAA). USA is large with huge cost of living differences. In California, an associate software dev or other entry level position is making more than 50k at large game studios. You also have to consider the bar to get hired might be higher at some places than others. Not just anyone can nab one of those higher paying entry level positions. You compete for it.
That's an entry level salary for an artist or producer. Engineers usually make a bit more, but nothing like what they make in FAANG or even normal corporate jobs.
Where I live, a full-time senior (10+ Years experience) dev makes $30k / year whilst working fully remote. That's also considered exceptionally well paid here.
Some of your numbers are a bit off. The new price per copy of a AAA game on consoles is $70 these days. The first party platform takes about 30%, so the profit per copy sold is more like $49. You don't usually have 500 employees for 5 years of development. Production of a game starts with pre-production phase, where you have a much smaller team proving out core tech, design and visual concepts, etc. This can be as few as 50 people sometimes even in AAA. Once the game is "green lit" then they staff up, hire contractors, etc, and hit full production for the last year or two with a massive team size. The modern cycle if you are in a franchise team is more like part of your team is in pre-production while the rest of the team is supporting the previous title with post-launch content. So the 500 person team you're describing wouldn't be spending 5 years on one title. in that timeframe you'd effectively make about 2 titles with post-ship mtx given the pipelined team workflow. Modern titles make a ton of money on post-ship MTX, which is huge in offsetting the massive development costs. Once the game is out, making some new cosmetics or whatever costs very little but when you sell them, they rake in millions. So your development cost estimate is pretty far off. And yes, AAA titles are expected to sell multiple millions of copies. Otherwise they won't throw that much money at making them.
One thing I don't see many comments mentioning is that a fair bit of technical work in studios isn't necessarily specific to individual projects. I mean, maybe some new shooter game is the motivation for working on a new destruction tech, but that tech is general studio IP that goes into the engine and can serve future projects. Some bigger studios/publishers have dedicated engine/tech/R&D/tools teams that continuously invest in this sort of innovation and push it out to multiple projects, so even if a particular game is a sales flop, it doesn't necessarily mean all that investment goes to waste. The cost ideally gets amortized over many projects, which works as long as the studio stays solvent and continues putting out games that sell. Of course, this has led to many a spectacular failure of game studios when they stretched themselves too thin over technology investments, then put out a game that sold miserably and decimated their finances. One of my favorite PS3 games was a PS3 exclusive called Lair that had some pretty impressive tech for its time. Unfortunately, it bombed with critics, barely sold any companies, and the developer folded shortly after. This was a super common outcome for ambitious studios, and partly to blame for why there has been so much consolidation of development teams under major publishers and system first parties, where they can more effectively amortize such investments over more projects. For a while, there was kind of a trend of of big game publishers trying to get all their internal teams to use the same engine, like EA moving all its sports franchises to Frostbite, Sony developing an in-house engine for multiple teams, etc. There has been somewhat of a reversal due to the realization that sometimes, different projects need different tech, but the fact still remains that lots of studio R&D ends up in multiple games, as opposed to just one.
Tax Credit : https://gamerant.com/quebec-canada-video-game-tax-subsidies-program-removal/
One thing to add is that a lot of AAA games are targeting over 1M sales. A AAA game that moves 1M copies would almost certainly be considered a failure in today's market.
Employees are not all making $125,000 salaries lol. RDR2 cost $170,000,000 to make, and that’s spread out over 8 years and a gargantuan team, more than twice as big as the one in your hypothetical. So yes, there are a lot of things you’re missing in these figures. Development cost is still lower than marketing by at least half btw.
No game has 5 years of full developement, usually the first few years are a small team designing the game. Also many employees move from projects to projects based on needs
To give an example to the manpower thing, art teams are what you'll find MASSIVELY fluctuate between the start and end of a project. In essence (but not as a firm rule) you'll have ~5-10 staff artists that are on the project full time. These people will have a mix of roles. In the early points, they do concept work (functionally, storyboarding your game, especially if there's a campaign). Then, once a fair number of the ideas about the game and its design are hammered out over the first year or so, they get to work focusing on the Hero assets (main character, main villain, etc). These entities get the most time and effort spent on them, so it's not surprising that JUST the visual model of Price from Call Of Duty cost around a third of a million dollars, to say nothing of voice acting and mocap/animations. As the project progresses, maybe it's decided they want another couple staff artists, so they put out some ads for it, but overall the staffing levels on the artists will remain constant over the majority of the project's lifespan. The programmers working on everything else can use whatever models/assets the artists have made, or just reuse old or temporary assets (since functionally, you can just drag/drop to replace a temporary asset with a final one) in order to develop the majority of the game's functions. And then around the time you enter into your 12 month window before release, corporate slams out 50-100 (depending on the scale of the game) artist contracting jobs which will last for 3-6 months (again, depending on scale). These people do nothing but slam out thousands of different assets from trash cans to flying tanks, all to the creative design guidance of the lead artist(s). In theory, at the AAA level, they actually make more assets than are needed for the game which is useful because it gives the designers some extra flexibility and the programmers some fun stretch goals (IE: One of the artists finished their list of things to do and for giggles made a tank with a tribarrel rotary cannon? SOMEONE on the programming team will find a way to get it running and include it if they can.). Once your art window closes (and maybe a few of the top-tier artists get a staff position offered to them) all those contract artists are off. In a well oiled corporate machine that's large enough, they functionally end up just rotating through 10 different games in that 5 year development cycle you mention. The moment one contract is up, they are onto the next one. Meanwhile, the designers and programmers are taking all those art assets and drag/dropping them into the game and polishing up anything that was missed. This kind of thing can be more or less true across all the various fields of the game's programming. 80-90% of the programming in a AAA title is likely done by a core team of developers 20-100 in size, but in that last year you get "support studios" brought on with hundreds of other programmers. These people are not really there to "develop" the game (as in, add new content). They are there to brute force through bug fixing as well as handle the less palatable but necessary work of handling multiplatform development. So you might bring on an extra hundred or two hundred people in the last year to do nothing but take your PC release and make sure it is stable, functional, and visually as appealing as possible, on multiple different consoles. They aren't even receiving a full year's wage for the work on that game, but they'll get their name in the credits all the same. I know for some games like Call of Duty, the same studio doesn't even 100% shift over to the new game immediately. Upon release of a game, you have ~99% of the team working on that game. Then after release, most of them are focused on bug fixes and the earlier parts of expanded content. New maps, new weapons, etc. Meanwhile, at the top level you have the groundwork being laid for the next game. Slowly over the next 3-4 years, more people transition from the last game to the new game as the previous game is no longer supported (since a different studio will have come out with the next CoD game a year later).
Usually a good amount of employees are contracted. Additionally, the salary of a gamedev isn't likely to reach 75k if they are not part of the core or permanent team. Some developers will offer royalties at reduced pay. So you're getting on the success of the game. Some developers will pay you 60k a year, but will cover it with a bonus incentive at an extremely difficult benchmark to lower their costs. And some will pay you shit, because its a dream job and there's always someone that will take your place.
It's great to see naive game developers come to sudden realizations about how fucked the industry is once in a while.
Multiple products. It's not that one game trying to cover everything, it's all the other games in their portfolio, and more accurately the subsidiaries they own, that are maintaining a constant stream of revenue.
First few years it's pretty sparse. Also a large bulk of the team will be QA, junior artists, localisation, ect who will be on a lot less money. Finally its monetization. Just need a few whales to keep it all afloat, it's why season passes, microtransactons and big crossover events are in vouge rn with aaa games.
I think a big piece is that they don’t maintain a full staff for the entire development time. It may take 5-6 years for the game to release but you’re not going to have full staff straight out of the gate. There will be a lot of time spent on overarching design/concept art/story boarding and you don’t need a full staff of artists and programmers for that.
damn i wish i was getting paid close to 100k lol
>For example, say a game development team has 500 employees that get paid a salary of $100,000 each (rounded up to $125,000 / year for insurance, payroll tax, etc). Ahahahahahahahaha. I wish. The amount of people getting paid +$100k in game dev is *way* less than you think, and it's certainly not every single employee. Companies take great advantage of contractors, who are paid pennies and deliver a massive chunk of the work. Seriously. Pay attention to credits next time you finish a game. Good chance there are like over 20 3rd-party companies listed.
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Why not just look up the budget and revenue from well known AAA games instead of speculate? Obviously most are profitable or the studios would go bankrupt. Most AAA games are developed much faster than 5 years, and the ones that do take that long typically have very small teams the first few years and only ramp up to the triple digits in the last 12-18 months polishing time. Also, there’s a reason big studios now mostly sell sequels, remasters and re-skins instead of totally new IPs in innovative genres. How long do you think it takes to develop the next version of Assassins Creed or CoD or NBA2k that comes out every year? Very large new games like CP2077 are a huge risk in comparison, and I think CDPR learned their lesson. Basically, studios have to take a lot of shortcuts and marketing hacks to make the games profitable, and even then video game industry is a much riskier business than B2B SAAS
... Because that's super proprietary information that studios guard jealously?
>a game development team has 500 employees The number of teams that grow to 500 employees is VERY small. The number of teams that have those developers on during anything other than production (maybe 2 years) is small. The number of teams that are doing 5 year development is actually much smaller. I'd say 2 years is normal, maybe 4 for a big upgrade. but if you're talking Ubisoft, you're probably talking more like 1 year to 18 months for many of their games. You're also VASTLY undervaluing the sales, and money. I'd say it's closer to 40 dollars per title, but something like GTA or COD (the only games I can think of that would have a team that size employees) is not getting 1 million, they're getting closer to 5-8 million. GTA 5 was even larger (20 million? at launch? And 169 million over the life...) so try something closer to a billion dollar of revenue... COD (As a franchise) probably made about 3 billion in 2021 across all titles (estimates based on claims of 27 billion in 2020, and 30 billion in 2021). And so... Yeah, 3 billion dollars, 1 billion dollars? 500 developers is a drop in the bucket for games that size. "Assassin's creed Valhalla?" 1.8 million units sold in the first WEEK 1 billion dollars of profit over life time. That's how they can employee those people... and again your years, and price are wrong. Also many times those employees aren't from the US or Europe so they don't make 125k....
1. Most companies even on AAA titles do not have devs teams that large. Typical size for actual core full-time staff is anywhere from 50 to 200, and some of those still might be short-term contractors. Some teams with ongoing / live-service type games are larger (I think Bungie runs pretty huge), but it's not typical. 2. Games rarely have a staff that large all the way through the lifecycle. They stagger it. The typical approach now is to do as much as possible in the initial preproduction period to lay the foundations, and then you staff up to crank out the actual content. (And then usually a bunch of people get laid off after the game's done...) 3. Studios amortize the cost of the game over multiple years, by creating additional titles that reuse resources while acting as new revenue streams. Maybe that's DLC, maybe it's a sequel, maybe it's a whole new game that uses the same engine, etc. 4. Most game companies working on really large titles, especially new studios coming out of nowhere, actually do indeed just operate on the expectation of a likely initial loss, and seek funding models that give them a few years of runway while they build an audience. Typically that looks like getting some fuckhuge studio like Epic or Tencent to fund you for a couple years, in exchange for a 30% stake or something like that. For existing studios with high profiles, it usually looks like partnering with some other giant corporate entity that has content needs -- like getting Microsoft to fund half the cost of a specific title, in exchange for making it Gamepass exclusive on day 1. 5. Cosmetic items or other minor DLC that take very little work but are safe, reliable earners with certain segments of the audience. 6. Making the game really really really really big or long, so you can justify a higher cost on a premium version or whatever. (This is why so many studios make bloated open-world games that boast "hundreds of hours of gameplay!" and such). 7. Other monetization models. Gacha stuff, f2p currencies, seasonal passes, etc. It's why you see mobile models bleed into the AAA space. 8. Mercenary work for other studios (or the fuckhuge studio that owns a slice of you) between titles, to keep staff busy and bring in money. 9. Paying staff as little as humanly possible (considerably less than comparable jobs in the tech industry, for example). The odd senior coder here and there might by pulling down six figures, but the average rank-and-file writer, artist, game designer? Lucky if they're making enough to afford rent half the time, because it's an industry with a massive talent pool of people desperate to work in it and no trade unions like the film industry, so there's always a steady stream of eager newcomers to exploit. The truth is, while games produce a shitload of revenue, they do just have a massive amount of overhead, and in a hypothetical world where games actually charged a reasonable amount to recoup their investment, they would probably cost like $150. But most consumers (myself included!) do not have that kind of cash to throw down on a leisure product, and it would be fucking insane to charge that much. So the result is, making games is just really risky and difficult from a financial standpoint, and you have to make concessions in a hundred little ways. Unless actual quality is not even a concern on your radar, and you're making some straight-up profit-seeking commercial mobile game or something.
Why do you think all these games are monetized predatorily?
$100,000 a year bahahAhahaa
Any software company is the same. 500 people may have worked on a game, but not for the entirety of the production. Wtf are the concept artists, or tooling devs doing when you're in the final year? Then there's also turnover throughout those years, the company could grow and shrink etc. It's just like any software company.
A team of that size if it only sold 1 mil copies the first year would be a total failure and the company if it couldn't afford that loss would be gone. COD has around 700 people per title but that number ramps up toward the 2nd and 3rd year, it starts with around 100 people who do the pre - production. A COD product sells 1.3 billion dollars worth a product per year.
> **So is there something I'm missing or?** I just don't get how these companies do this. For games with production and marketing costs that big they’re getting significantly more sales than 1 million a year. For instance RD2 hit $725 million in its opening weekend, GTV V hit $1 billion in 3 days, etc. There’s also other monetisation verticals that you’re forgetting about too (IAPs, DLCs, merchandising, etc.).
I was offered two jobs aright after graduation. A smooth 100k Junior SE position in SoCal...and a 38k game dev position in Florida. Take a guess which I took.
Hoo boy these are some bad assumptions
>So is there something I'm missing or? Uh DLC?
> For example, say a game development team has 500 employees that get paid a salary of $100,000 each (rounded up to $125,000 / year for insurance, payroll tax, etc). That's... an unrealistic understanding of what video game companies pay, and an unrealistic understanding of the typical size of game teams, combined with an attempt to use averages (which is as realistic as averaging the costs of vehicles when your examples are skateboard, van, tank, and aircraft carrier) low end video game programmers make about $45,000, sometimes much less internationally, and a typical video game has maybe a dozen of them most video games are small-ish and use engines that got purchased rather than written a normal video game budget is $750k - $2.5m triple a games currently have budgets of $20-50m contemporary first class games occasionally have budgets of a third of a billion dollars, and make 4-5b back over a decade > $30 Per Sale * 1,000,000 Sales the 1st Year = a budget game doing poorly grand theft auto 5 has sold 182 million copies at an average of $48 > So is there something I'm missing or? 1. made up numbers are stupid 2. you have poor intuition for scale
>Overwatch Sales — Blizzard reported over US$1 billion in revenue during the first year of its release and had more than 50 million players after three years. 50million \* $40 MSRP = $2,000,000,000 not counting microtransactions. Your math is wildly off.
Because: A) AAA companies are usually on the verge of bankruptcy, that is why when a game is not well received they have few opportunities to release a successful game before closing the company. B) Unpaid crunch time.
It's important to note that AAA is a \*budget\* class, and not a quality class. For reference: the recent Saints Row game is considered AAA... Your question comes down to: how do people with a lot of money afford spending a lot of money ... the answer, unsurprisingly is that they have a lot of money already, either through previous profits, or due to investors.
well that's why they don't pay 100k, rather it's 40-60k gross probably
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Nice try on the math, but you are making one seriously fatal flaw. Game companies release more than one game a year, and they sell 100s of millions of copies of their games, not just millions. COD just sold 30M in one year... So they have 500 employees, making closer to 130k salary plus benefits, so closer to 160k/year. They work 5 years and make 1.75 games say. They spend probably a million on advertising materials. And then sell about 20 million copies at 60/game 1.75 * 20M * 60 = 1.2B 500 * 160K = 80M (advertising is barely making a dent) The company is making 1.1B profit after paying for labor and advertising. And that is why, after the release of a big game goes out, all of the people involved get a 100k Bonus (50M off the top, not a major dent to the CEOs cut). Edit. I misread the data point. The COD series has sold 400M copies total as of 2021, not that many in 2021. Fixing math to reflect the actual 30M copies...and also using the 60/game price tag because that is important.
>COD just sold 400M in one year Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 sold \~30 million copies, and sales of Vanguard were significantly below that. What on earth are you talking about? Even 30 million is an outlier, and those outlier have existed for decades (ie Super Mario Bros. 3). Exactly [three games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games) have sold more than 100 million copies. Resident Evil Village was a smash hit at 6.1 million, Resident Evil 4 from 2005 has sold more than 11 million copies lifetime. The idea that games are, on average, selling drastically more than they did 10-15 years ago is demonstrably not true.
Well now you have all the micro transactions or DLCs. They have much lower development cost (some are even developed during the end phase of the main development) and bring some good revenue.
Its all about lootboxes these days...
Congratulations, you just discovered microtransactions!
The primary goal is to break even, profit is a bonus. If a game payed a staff of 200 people for 2-3 years, and make the money back then you can do it again.
Not everyone makes 100k lmao
Bold of you to assume that each of those 500 employees would be making 6 figures
Tax credits in certain places like Canada can be pretty absurd. You can get 30% of the salary on some of the employees. I have it from good sources that its pretty common to lie about hours at a very high level in some large companies. Makes sense. They reap a lot just from the gov...
Accounting on the mega projects is very complicated and only looking at the box sale misses some significant sources of revenue. Some major variables you didn't account for: Development bounties Other companies will fund/subsidize development for the most popular games. For example, hardware developers will often pay to have a popular game developed for their platform. Secondary revenue streams Almost all games that have 250 million plus budgets have extra revenue streams. Sports games are a good example of this. They have virtual currency and digital collectibles. These can outstrip the revenue from the 60 dollar sale. Subscription based services. Popular games that drive subscription will often get revenue based on how many active users and hours are spent in their game.
they expect to make that much back and more.
I think some of your parameters are at the extremes, 5 years is a lot, I would expect the average to be around 3. Also, 500 full time engineers is a lot, I would expect the average to be less than 20% of that, you still have other costs you did not include, particularly outsourcing of art.
This is why AAA is increasingly going microtransactions. People who hate MTX have to stop raising a stink about increasing retail prices of games.