One upside of the deserved backlash over $80 baseline pricing for games – something Microsoft has publicly backed down from and companies like EA have skirted for now – is that more people are talking about how much games cost to make. One defense we've heard for $80 games is that prices must match rising production costs, particularly at the AAA level. When costs go up, prices go up, sure. However, this wrongly assumes that those AAA production costs – routinely inflated by wasted labor and overall mismanagement – can't be avoided or reduced, and that games absolutely need to be this big and shiny and expensive. The best games of 2025 so far prove the argument flat wrong, and the big, shiny, and expensive games that didn't cost $80 even last year flatten it further.
But another truth co-exists: games are expensive to make, just in general, and more to the point, they're much more expensive to make than a lot of people think. I spoke to over 40 game developers earlier this year for a big discussion about what people get wrong about games, and one topic came up enough that I eventually decided to give it its own dedicated space. Now seemed like a good time to wade into how much games cost to make.
