Video games cost a lot of money to make. We’ve known that for a long time, and while the budgets for individual games are usually kept a secret in the games industry, the fact that games can fail despite having sold millions of copies kind of suggests that budgets are ballooning to pretty ludicrous sizes. When you have massive games like Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth failing to hit a company like Square Enix’s expectations, you just know that a considerable amount of money was sunk into both of them.
We have had a couple of instances in the past where a game’s budget has slipped out, giving us a rough estimate of exactly how much money is required. For example, the budgets for both The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West were accidentally leaked during Sony’s big push to stop Xbox acquiring Activision, both of which were over $200 million.
Video Game Budgets Are Slowly Getting Worse
Exact budgets of video-game productions can be tough to corroborate (more transparency from publishers would be nice!) but the numbers I’ve heard floating around AAA game dev these days are $300 million or more — sometimes much more! — which I think helps explain the current state of the industry
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier.bsky.social) 2026-03-25T20:38:45.547Z
That’s already an eye-watering amount of money, but it seems as though things have been getting worse in recent years. In a new BlueSky post by Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, he claims that the numbers he’s heard “floating around” regarding AAA game dev budgets these days are in excess of $300 million and “sometimes much more.”
He points out that those are the budgets for video games developed in the US and Canada, and are mostly made up of developer wages, and don’t have anything to do with bonuses dished out to executives, which usually come in the form of stock. In countries where developers are paid less, game budgets would obviously be lower.
Activision Spent Over $700 Million Making Call Of Duty Black Ops: Cold War
Activision reportedly spent over $1.7 billion making just three Call of Duty games.
That being said, a budget of around $300 million feels incredibly unsustainable, and just doing the simple math on that, without any other potential factors, a triple AAA game would have to sell roughly 4.5 million copies at full price in order to make its money back.
It feels as though the time games spend in development would need to drop drastically for budgets to go back to anywhere near where they should probably be. It also makes games like Arc Raiders, which apparently cost just $75 million to make within three years, extremely rare cases these days. However, with the importance of graphical fidelity constantly rising, whether you want it to or not, and the length of which games take to make, I don’t see the issue easing any time soon.
- Released
-
June 19, 2020
- ESRB
-
M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Drugs
- Engine
-
Proprietary
- Cross-Platform Play
-
no
- Cross Save
-
no
