Red dead redemption 2 didn’t stop at being pretty. If it did I don’t think we would all talk about it so fondly. Totally agree that it’s a great looking game though.
It’s probably significantly more than 10-25 million a year in additional wages given the quality of employees, but it’s still likely pocket change next to things like the marketing budget. I work in a more capital intensive industry (tooling, hard parts, etc), but we still spend a few billion on engineering. Know what else we spend a few billion on? Marketing, amoung many other things. Job cuts always make me chuckle because they’re a, “we’re doing something” but we spend orders of magnitude more on material, facilities, etc.