Why So Many Video Games Cost So Much to Make

[Anomander]

Also Scrum

 

[deuxhero]

Why do you need that many writers, and why do you need to split one character's dialog between multiple writers?

It may make sense to just let someone who is writing a quest write a few lines for certain character who will have small parts for a lot of things, like companions or questgivers, and let whoever is in charge of that character make sure it fits/tweak it latter. For example, were the New Vegas Quests "Things That Go Boom" and/or "Kings' Gambit" made by different people, it wouldn't be too crazy to let the writer(s) of each of those quests write at least a rough draft for the needed lines of Ambassador Crocker. Something tells me that's not what was happening though.

 

[Morgoth]

Greed?

 

[JarlFrank]

Something tells me that's not what was happening though.

The games he was working on weren't RPGs and had no quests, but multiplayer FPS with some characters that needed a bunch of iconic lines.

 

[Iucounu]

Devs will have to start thinking about process optimization, cutting costs, etc.

This was already an important topic long time ago when I brushed with the industry. One of the main issues is completely incompetent management. You'll even find in some of Tim Cain's videos how casually he talked about hiring people with no qualification in such positions or how he handwaves big mistakes he did when he was management. I had the impression he just doesn't know any better which means he never met in his career competent "suits".

Usual result is they'll slow the development even more while trying to improve it, or at the very least generate overtime for no reason.

Is this because small studios were originally managed by one of the former devs, and as the company grew the original manager couldn't handle it? So basically the result of growing too fast?

 

[Hobknobling]

Also Scrum

The Agile Manifesto and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

 

[abija]

It's not agile, or waterfall, or whatever system. It's the management abusing them.

 

[CanadianCorndog]

The high cost is usually due to re-re-re-re-re-re-design.
If a game is projected to take two years to complete, and ends up taking five years, it's not like they were spending that time making 3x the amount of art or getting rid of every bug. What happens is they design, try it out, don't like it, re-design, don't like it, re-design, try it out, don't like it, etc. The design team will ask for extensions, get it, and start on another round of re-re-re-re-design. This constant re-design loop can also be driven by people at higher levels, but it's usually the design team themselves.
While that process is going on, there is the programming team having to constantly re-re-re-re-engineer systems and create new ones. There is a core team of artists who are also making assets for prototyping, demos, and marketing.
Eventually, the studio and publisher puts a gun to the re-re-re-re-re-design team's heads and says, ship or else. And ship it fast.
This is where a shitload of artists are hired to get the project finished. Artists typically finish their sprints with a 95% completion rate. Studios can also crunch them to get even more work out of them for their salaries. Most of the art you see in a game that went one, two, five, or more years over schedule was made in the last year of the project. The current plan to reduce costs is to get rid of the artists, those people who complete tasks and ship games, with AI in the hands of designers. I'm not sure if anyone has looked at the numbers in Jira lately, but I don't think it's going to work like they plan.
This sort of process has been going on for decades in Western games. It has nothing to do with budgets, DEI, or graphics resolution.
You can go back over the past 25 years and see lots of examples of this endless re-design loop.
In the case of games with massive budgets that do ship on time, that is mostly due to marketing.
Last of Us Part 2 dev time - almost six years

For example, Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, released in 2009, cost $20 million. The studio’s most recent game, 2020’s The Last of Us Part II, cost $220 million.

Uncharted 2 dev time - 22 months
Last of Us Part 2 dev time - 70 months
If you take 70 months to make a game, there is no way that the art made in year one is used in the final game. That is at least one and a half console generations.

 

[Inec0rn]

It's not agile, or waterfall, or whatever system. It's the management abusing them.

Most large businesses practice what I call "wagile" anyway, which is a total clusterfuck that wastes millions and produces shit results. The best companies I've seen out there have almost no middle management, I pretty much know immediately if I encounter 3+ managers within a week working in place that the job is going to be fucking terrible.

If a company really does embrace Agile as intended all those managers should be shown the door, they actually intentionally sabotage companies to stay lazy and employed.