Opinion - Rising Costs and Mid Tier Studios

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Gamesindustry ask Brian Fargo and Jeff Pobst about rising game development costs and how they are putting the squeeze on mid-tier studios such as inXile and Turtle Rock.

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Rising game dev costs put squeeze on mid-tier studios

inXile's Brian Fargo, Hidden Path's Jeff Pobst and Turtle Rock's Steve Goldstein weigh in on the growing gap between gaming's haves and have-nots

Making games is expensive. Let me rephrase that: making games is really, really expensive.

Obviously, that's no secret, but the numbers involved are even surprising to those of us who follow the industry every day. Last month, Kotaku reported many studios budget around $10,000 per person per month to cover salaries plus overhead. Considering that many of the more polished games on the market can take years to create, budgets can spiral out of control very easily and this has a impact on the entire ecosystem.

Moreover, that $10,000 figure is actually lower than many studios spend, industry veterans Brian Fargo (inXile Entertainment) and Jeff Pobst (Hidden Path Entertainment) tell me.

"I used $10,000 per man-month [for budgets] when I was a producer for Sierra online in 2000," Pobst notes.
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Fargo concurs: "I would say [$10,000 is] on the low side. I think Tim Schafer pointed out a couple of years ago that this is why these things cost so much to make. There's a big difference between small developers cutting their teeth that have no overhead versus a team of people who've been in the business for two decades. They have families and expect medical insurance, and so it's not going to be something that costs less than $10,000 on average for my people.

"That's on the low end by maybe 20% or 30%. I don't think we're seeing double that, but certainly it's the trajectory we're all going towards. I think that's a fair number. It's always been a funny disparity. We talk about making a game with a budget of, say, $10 million and the smaller developers tend to look at it and go, 'How do they waste so much money?' And then the triple-A guys say, 'How do they do it for so cheap?'

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