The announcement that UK authorities are also Microsoft Activision deal have stopped for the time being made waves in the industry and sent Activision’s share price into freefall for a short period of time. While it remains unclear whether the purchase will actually go ahead, the document also revealed a wealth of other information. Big publishers say that AAA games can cost up to a billion dollars. It was only last week that several well-known role-playing game designers talked about the Cost explosion in the development of video games spoken.
AAA games are getting more and more expensive
The incredibly extensive report by the UK supervisory authority CMA provides numerous insights behind the scenes of the video game industry. According to the 400+ page document, some publishers say AAA games will be released in the future a billion dollars could cost.
Current blockbusters with a potential release for 2024 or 2025 work with a development budget of 200 million dollars upwards. Call of Duty even cracked the 300 million mark in terms of development costs and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 will probably easily break the 250 million mark and probably even exceed it.
Marketing costs continue to drive up costs
However, all of these numbers are just that pure development costs, together with budgets for the sometimes extremely complex marketing of the games, there is definitely potential to reach the one billion dollar mark. A large studio is already reporting that the development of a larger franchise title cost 660 million dollars and an additional 550 million dollars are being invested in marketing.
This cost explosion is particularly impressive when you consider that five years ago, AAA games were still between $50 and $150 million set as a budget.
Call of Duty was not a factor in CMA’s decision
The reasoning of the Competitions and Market Authority (CMA) shows that Call of Duty was not the decisive factor in stopping Microsoft’s purchase of Blizzard. Instead, they called that “fast growing cloud gaming market” to tip the scales. The supervisory authority fears that Microsoft would expand its already great advantage so much that it harms competition and possible innovations.
Source: ign
