3000 people 1/2 are middle management that don’t do shit. The cost of game dev isn’t the people making the games, it’s advertising and c level salaries.

The $700M figure is approximately three years of development time (Call of Duty rotates between a few studios every year to allow other studios time to make the next game in the series), plus marketing, plus post-launch DLC work.

Something tells me having 3000 trying to justify their wages is how they got a bloated mess in the first place.

If you can’t beat them, become part of the problem.

One problem, I think, is that if you have a lot of assets invested in a particular game style, then it’s costly to revise the game.

I remember that it happened with the original Halo, where the game was massively revised across different genres during development. But I think that in general, once you’ve made the assets, it’s increasingly painful to dramatically change the game.

I’ve also heard complaints that AAA studios are “risk-adverse” – but, honestly, I’d be kind of cautious about gambling a lot of asset money on an unproven game too.

Whereas game genres that are extremely asset-light, like traditional roguelikes, often have pretty polished gameplay – the developers can cheaply iterate on the gameplay, because they don’t have to throw out much asset work.

A lot of indie games today kind of fall into this camp, do stuff like low-res pixel art to save on asset costs.

One thing I’ve kind of wondered about is whether maybe more of the video game industry should look more like a two-phase affair. You have games made on relatively small asset budgets, kinda more like indie games. Some fail, some succeed.

But then when one is really successful, it becomes common for a studio that specializes in AAA titles to acquire it and do a high-production-value version of the game. That de-risks the game somewhat, since the AAA studio knows that it has a game with popular gameplay, and specializes in churning out a really high-value form.

Now, okay. That doesn’t work with all genres. Some genres, like adventure games, you only really play once. Some games don’t do very well on the low-asset side – it’s hard to create an open-world FPS game on a budget.

But there have been a lot of times that I’ve purchased a low-asset-cost game that I really like and then thought “I wish that there was more stuff on the asset side”, that I could go and pay more and get it.

Like, for those low-res pixel art games, I’d like to have the ability to get full-res art. I’d often like more soundtracks. I’ve played a few games that have had outstanding voice acting, like Logan Cunningham in Transistor or Ron Perlman in Fallout: New Vegas, and I think that you could usually take many existing games and go back and stick good voice acting in and make the experience a lot better. A lot of 3D games could take more-extensive bowling and texturing.

Yeah, some old games get remakes to take advantage of new technology, and sometimes they get fancier assets when that happens, but this isn’t that – I’m talking about taking a popular, relatively-current game with a limited asset budget and giving it a high-budget makeover.

Wait, but we had recently a feature from PMG on YouTube showing how a significant portion of the art of devs like the coalition and Naughty Dog being contracted to sweatshops in Asia. So basically game development budgets are to pay a handful of talented programmers and the friends of the art and writing department while sweatshops do the work. Mega lol, we have bay area entitled shitheads playing ping pong in the office and adoring Elon while costing millions while the people who do the work are getting abused across the planet…

The beginning of the article offers analysis as to what the rest of it might be.

Not too long ago, I had coffee with a video-game developer who told me that work was slow and that they’d been spending half of their days watching Netflix.

For a second I was stunned — this person worked for a major corporation worth billions of dollars — until I remembered how many times I’d heard similar stories.

There was the developer who couldn’t work because the game’s tools weren’t ready. There was the team that had to drop everything they were doing because the creative director had played Breath of the Wild over the weekend and came away with some Great Ideas. There were the artists who were blocked from working as they waited for a colleague to finish a design.

In other words, it’s not uncommon for professional video-game makers to find themselves spinning their wheels for prolonged periods, during which they get paid to do very little work.

I think it’s an inherent problem with team scale. You can generally work faster when you know everyone that will use your code and you know exactly where and how it will be used. However if three thousand people will work with your code it has to be a lot more generic and water-tight. Adding more people to the team means that the rest of the team will work slower. You can’t add more people to the orchestra and have it played faster.