Making video games costs a lot of money. We've known for a long time, the budgets of individual games are generally kept secret in the gaming industry, but the fact that a game can flop despite selling millions of copies suggests that budgets are being inflated to some pretty absurd proportions. When massive games like Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth fail to hit the company like Square Enix hoped, it's clear that a significant amount of money was invested in both games.
We've had a few instances in the past where the game's budget has been drained, and this gave us a rough estimate of exactly how much money we needed. For example, the budgets of The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West were inadvertently leaked during Sony's massive push to block Xbox's acquisition of Activision, both of which were over $200 million.
Video game budgets are getting progressively worse.
The exact budget of a video game production can be difficult to confirm (it would be nice if there was more transparency from publishers!). But the number floating around for AAA game developers these days is more than $300 million. Sometimes it's much more! — I think it 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, but things seem to be getting worse in recent years. In a new BlueSky post from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, he claims that the “floating” numbers these days when it comes to AAA game development budgets are in excess of $300 million, with numbers “sometimes much higher.”
He points out that this is a budget for video games developed in the United States and Canada, and is comprised mostly of developer wages and has nothing to do with bonuses given to executives, which typically come in the form of stock. In countries that pay developers less, game budgets will obviously be lower.
Activision has invested more than $700 million into creating Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War.
Activision reportedly spent more than $1.7 billion making three Call of Duty games.
That said, a budget of around $300 million feels incredibly unsustainable, and if you do the simple math without any other potential factors, a triple AAA game would need to sell around 4.5 million copies at full price to make its money back.
It seems like the time it takes to develop the game will have to be drastically reduced to get the budget back to where it should be. They're also making games like Arc Raiders, which apparently cost just $75 million to make in three years, which is extremely rare these days. But like it or not, this problem doesn't appear to be abating any time soon, as the time it takes to create games continues to increase and the importance of graphical fidelity continues to increase.
- released
-
June 19, 2020
- ESRB
-
M (Mature): Blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, sexual content, strong language, drug use.
- engine
-
ownership
- cross platform play
-
no
- cross save
-
no
