Developing high-budget video games on the US West Coast, particularly at well-known studios like Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio (owned by Sony), has become incredibly expensive.
In a recent post on BlueSky, Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier noted that reported development costs for major video games are often $300 million or higher—and can be significantly more. He believes this explains many of the challenges the gaming industry is currently facing.
He explained that these numbers mainly cover salaries and general operating costs, and don’t include pay for executives. (And, of course, executive compensation still needs to be factored in.)
Schreier put the situation into perspective:
Let’s say you sell a game for $70, and after the store takes its 30% cut (for digital sales), you earn $49 per copy. If the game cost $300 million to make, you’d need to sell over 6 million copies just to cover those development costs – and that doesn’t even include the money spent on marketing.
As a gamer, it’s pretty clear to me why Sony does things differently than other game companies. They get to keep more of the money from game sales on the PlayStation Store, which is awesome. Plus, all their other services and games help cover the cost of making new titles, so it’s a win-win for them and, hopefully, for us players too!
However, this creates huge expectations for their game development teams. A game like Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, for instance, really needs to succeed.
Plus, independent game developers can release their games on many different systems, but they don’t have the benefit of support from a major console or PC company like Sony, Microsoft, or Valve.
This is a complex problem. Just making titles less important won’t necessarily fix things, and it will likely result in job losses anyway.
However, customers seem hesitant to accept another price hike, especially since they already reacted negatively to the software increasing to $80.
Considering how tight money is for most people right now, are enough customers able to afford games priced at $90 or $100?
No matter how you look at it, these budgets just don’t seem realistic. If a game needs to sell millions of copies at full price just to cover its costs, what hope do most games have of being profitable?
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2026-03-26 06:06