One BEEELLION dollars

So, I guess this is the new reality of game development. Recent
reports by the UK CMA (the agency that deals with whether or not
mergers should be allowed) recently noted that triple-A games can cost
upwards of one billion dollars (with included marketing). Yay?

It's a ridiculous amount, of course; not only that so much money and
resources should be poured into what's a completely disposable luxury
product, but that it should cost so much to begin with. Nobody's
getting value for money from these overpriced behemoth games; not the
developers (who are crunched and forced to make mass-market garbage),
nor the publishers (who risk way too much money for games that have
such a high probability of flopping, or just breaking even), and
certainly not the gamers, who are saddled with increasingly excessive
MTX as the publishers struggle to make their money back.

And you have to wonder, WHERE is all this money really going? Does
"Call of Duty CCCLXIV: More Call, More Duty" really look and play so
much better than "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" released in 2007? That
game is estimated to have cost $60 million USD (with another $100
million USD for marketing); even adjusting for inflation, do the newer
Call of Duty titles really feel like they're offering three times as
much content? And now let's compare that to "Grand Theft Auto V"; its
total budget was $250 million USD. How can the latest "Call of Duty"
(or generally, _any_ modern shooter) justify their cost? Do Activision
programmers do their programming on solid-gold keyboards or something?

It doesn't have to be this way. The total budget for "Black Myth:
Wukong" was $70 million. "Control" was $30 million. There aren't any
official figures on "Space Marine 2", but the few estimates I saw put
its total budget at < $100 million. These are all still incredible
amounts, but a far cry from the wastefulness of the triple-A studios.

The big studios cry at us that they just HAVE to put all these
lootboxes and MTX and other nonsense into their games because
development costs have skyrocketed so much. Arguably, they're right:
its unlikely that the publishers could make their money back if they
depended entirely on retail sales as their sole source of revenue. But
maybe a better solution would be to cut back on the fucking costs
instead?

It's not just that MTX/etc. are fucking over games. It's that it's an
unsustainable business. In order to get Fortnite money, you need
players to spend incredible lengths of time with your game. Nobody's
going to spend $500 on cosmetics and DLC on a game they'll only spend
30 hours on. But there's only so many hours in a day; you can only
have so many mega-live-service Fortnite-style games out there. If you
reaching for that gold ring with your next game, the odds are
incredibly high that you will miss... and if you spend $1 billion
developing and advertising that game, that miss (and the subsequent
fall) is going to be very painful.

It makes a $30 million flop look almost cozy in comparison.

Aim lower, triple-A publishers. It's more certain and -while not as
flashy- will probably net you more cash in the long run.