The Daily Populous Wednesday November 26th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by clawsomegamer.com and submitted by Darth_Vaper883

The AAA games industry has been struggling with rising costs for a while. Whether it be the rising costs of production or the ever-increasing expenses of modern marketing campaigns, games cost exponentially more to make today than they did in the last decade.

This also means that profitability is more challenging to achieve for modern games than ever. In fact, a former EA executive states that AAA games need to sell at least 6 million copies to break even.

Kiwi Talkz recently spoke to Bryan Walker, who previously worked as a producer at EA, Activision, and Retro Studios.

Discussing the cost of modern AAA development, the former producer discussed how even high-quality mobile games can cost a whopping $100 million today. Of course, this would be an incredibly modest budget for a AAA production, with most titles requiring much bigger budgets to ship.

Bryan Walker states that a game with a $100 million budget must sell at least 6 million units to break even. This is because factors like the 30% storefront cuts from PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, etc. He also suggests that this calculation is applicable primarily to digital sales, with retailers taking a slightly larger cut from the overall revenue.

Elsewhere, Bryan Walker noted that refund costs and other expenses must be taken into account when looking at the overall figures. He estimates that refunds alone can lead to a 15% decline in the overall revenue.

Even a high-quality is gonna cost 9 digits to make start to finish. At $100 million, you’ve probably got to move about 6 million to break even. – Bryan Walker

The interesting part here is that most AAA games have budgets 2-3x higher than the $100 million figure. This means that they must sell upwards of 10 million units to become profitable when relying purely on revenue generated from unit sales. However, this is also why other means of generating revenue are so popular today.

According to Bryan Walker, battle passes, microtransactions, and other DLC releases play a huge role in keeping games profitable today. These secondary revenue streams eventually allow AAA titles to reach big numbers that would not have been possible otherwise. In particular, the live-service model has become a gold mine for developers who have found success within the genre.

WordNERD37 on November 25th, 2025 at 17:29 UTC »

Then, stop making these bloated trainwrecks and invest in to smaller and smarter titles.

Quality, over quantity, and I mean quanity in the giant size of the resources you use to make these damn things that end up being generally accepted as, "just fine," or "Bad."

Small, well made experiences please.

PhoenixDude1 on November 25th, 2025 at 17:19 UTC »

Yeah I'll stick with my AA and indie titles that don't drown me in microtransactions and live service AI slop. I'm so glad I grew up enjoying singleplayer games more than multi-player, and my wallet appreciated it too before I got into warhammer.

Ijustlovevideogames on November 25th, 2025 at 16:55 UTC »

So you guys gonna maybe pull back on the ballooning cost, reduce how much the top end gets paid, make smaller budget games? No, just gonna keep right on pushing for that unattainable until the bubble burst? Alright, I will be over here playing Clair Obscur if you need me then.