How Much Is Too Much For Game Budgets?

Something that comes up every once in a while is how budgets for big-name games are growing like crazy. Most recently I caught this article on how Gran Turismo 5 cost an estimated $60 million to make. How much money is too much for this stuff? I feel like some of this has to be pure excess, like all the test driving and massive research budget, and I have to wonder how much that stuff matters to the final game?

I can appreciate the need for realism but I feel like there is a point at which you’re just getting too accurate for it to be noticed by anyone but the folks making the game. Extrapolating this out I think that it holds that for all of these giant games there has to be a point of no return as far as investment goes. I look at voice acting, graphical fidelity, and extra modes in this way a lot. It impacts us as gamers quite a bit even though it may not be readily apparent. Games get released slower, they cost more, there’s less DLC, and development gets focused in the wrong areas.

Games are just getting bigger and that means that companies are going to bloat their games with all sorts of junk that none of us will ever actually notice or care about. I’d rather have a game come out that runs efficiently with a neat art style (one that helps offset the lower fidelity ideally) and that has modes that are fun and cater to the game’s strengths. I would also like them to come out sooner, cheaper, and be iterative in nature by leveraging DLC. My dream and the way the industry is headed couldn’t be more divergent though it seems.

The industry is still built around large tent pole titles instead of a lot of smaller hits, but it seems that this may be changing direction with the success of a few smaller games on multiple platforms, most notably XBLA, PSN, Steam, and the iPhone. Once these developers get a hit I hope that they keep their operations lean, for all our sakes…