Truth bomb: cutting development budgets will not benefit gamers or developers

Let’s surmise for a moment that the Last of Us Part 3 miraculously cost $100 million to develop instead of $300 million. Is anyone here naïve enough to believe that the $200 million delta will be passed along to customers or developers?

There is not one publisher on this planet that would say “hey, we saved a ton of money, let’s be decent and regress to the $60 standard price point or charge less for DLC or give raises and bonuses to the worker bees who made these games.” Here’s what would happen: those cost savings will be paid out to executives as performance bonuses (rewards for reaching sales metrics, getting a high Metacritic score, or meeting metrics around saving G&A). Or those savings would be passed along to shareholders as dividends to incentivize holds instead of sell offs. Or they would do stock buybacks.

Furthermore, lower budgets do not guarantee greenlights and funding for new innovative games or stemming the tide of headcount reductions or launching buggy incomplete games.

Not claiming that development budgets should not be lower but please do not fool yourselves into believing that gamers or developers would see or benefit from a penny of those cost savings.

For me, it's less about the savings being "passed on to the customer" and more about not wasting that extra money on what is, to me at least, bullshit.

That "saved" $200 mil can be used for R&D of new game engines and technologies, new IP's, the establishment of infrastructure (servers and so forth), hiring of more employees, and the opening of new studios.

And let's be honest: the majority of the budget goes to marketing and advertising, and do we really need to advertise TLOU, COD, and other established franchises? I mean maybe a little bit but not much.

One game that costs $300 million has to sell a lot to make a profit. They are going to play it safe, and appeal to the lowest common denominator. This is like an Assassin's Creed or a CoD.

A game that costs $100 million, also has to do these things, but maybe not as aggressively. They can afford to take a few risks on some new ideas. This would be like an Armored Core or Control.

The point isn't for savings to be passed down directly to consumers per say, more that we get a wider variety of games with a unique hook to them.

This is actually good. Smaller budgets, smaller teams, smaller games, means less stress on the teams and less time so they can perform better.