Rising Game Budgets

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Abstract

Problem: Why have video game development budgets been rising steadily over the past several decades?

Approach: Tim Cain draws on his personal experience shipping games from Fallout through The Outer Worlds — a 20+ year span — and breaks down the cost drivers into concrete categories.

Findings: Budgets rise due to a combination of inflation, rising developer salaries and associated "people costs," escalating equipment and software expenses, office overhead, increasing art complexity driven by player expectations, expanding feature requirements, and a ballooning marketing spend that can exceed development budgets by 2–3×.

Key insight: It's not one thing — it's compounding pressure from every direction. Art expectations, feature creep, and marketing costs each independently push budgets up, and together they create an exponential trend that even better tooling can't offset.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je016BRB2-U

Tim's Personal Budget Trend

Tim shows a chart of every game he's shipped from Fallout through The Outer Worlds (spanning ~20 years), with budgets in millions. While there are dips — Temple of Elemental Evil cost less than Arcanum; Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny cost less than South Park: The Stick of Truth — the trend line is unmistakably upward. Even within one developer's career, budgets have consistently risen.

Inflation and Developer Salaries

The most obvious driver is inflation: everything simply costs more. But the biggest line item is developer salaries, and Tim is emphatic that this is a good thing. Developers have historically been underpaid, and rising salaries reflect overdue correction. Beyond base salary, companies pay insurance, taxes (employer-side), and other per-person costs that compound quickly.

The Arcanum Lesson

Tim shares that at Troika Games, they completely misjudged these "people expenses" when budgeting Arcanum. The result: Tim, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson took half pay for the first year to year-and-a-half because the money simply wasn't there.

Equipment and Software

What seems straightforward — desks, chairs, computers — is actually a sprawling expense. Programmers often need a second machine for builds or dev kits. Artists need render machines. Teams need build servers that pull from source control multiple times a day, render farms, local network infrastructure, email servers, and tools like Confluence and Jira.

Software costs have shifted from one-time purchases to subscriptions (compilers, renderers, Photoshop, motion capture tools, sound processing, production tools). Far more tools are used now than 10–30 years ago — teams used to build everything themselves; now game engines, renderers, and compilers are all purchased.

Office Overhead

Rent is a significant fixed cost even when people work from home. Companies need physical locations for publisher visits, conference rooms, server rooms, and storage. Leases often run 2–10 years, and that cost gets amortized across every game's budget. Then there are utilities, parking, security systems, and electronic key fobs — all prompted by real incidents of unauthorized people wandering into studios.

The Art Bucket

Games need more people and take longer to make, and a huge reason is rising art expectations:

  • Higher polygon models → more artist time per asset
  • Higher resolution textures to match those models
  • Motion-captured animation where hand-keyed used to suffice
  • Facial animation — once nonexistent, now mandatory
  • Dedicated lighting artists who don't make a single level or asset but light every scene

Each of these individually requires more personnel and time. Together, they multiply the art budget dramatically.

The Feature Bucket

Players expect more features and better implementations of each:

  • Voice acting — once rare or absent, now expected. Some players literally refuse to play unvoiced games.
  • UI customization — resizable text, repositionable elements, separate volume sliders for VO/music/SFX
  • Input rebinding — beyond accessibility, players expect full controller and keyboard remapping
  • Options depth — every system needs extensive settings

Some of these features are easy to implement, but many (especially UI) are "painstakingly time-consuming." And once built, every feature must be tested and maintained. Time is money.

Marketing: The Hidden Budget Buster

Marketing is technically outside the development budget, but Tim flags it as a massive and growing cost. Ad prices have risen, targeted advertising requires expensive data, and consumers increasingly block ads or pay for premium ad-free experiences — making it harder and more expensive to reach players.

Tim reveals that some games have marketing budgets that double or triple their development budgets. This creates a dangerous feedback loop: marketing sets expectations high, the game disappoints because it can't match the hype, and the next project tries to include the promised features — driving the development budget up further.

The Bottom Line

There is no single culprit. Salaries, equipment, software subscriptions, rent, art complexity, feature expectations, and marketing all independently trend upward. Better tools help, but they can't outpace the compounding demands. Looking at games from 10, 20, or 30 years ago confirms the pattern: smaller teams, faster development, simpler art, fewer features.

References