I usually hear of marketing spend matching development cost, so it’s probably closer to 50/50. The documents that these figures came from didn’t itemize them, but it’s notable that 2020 is when current gen consoles came out, and more fidelity usually correlates to more time and money to make the assets.
It is development spend + marketing spend + post-launch DLC spend. Even forking the same code base, you can see where the money goes. The campaigns are original each time, new map design requires time and money, etc. In the past 5 years, there has probably been a CoD game that cost $1B to make, as this data is from 2020.
Yearly CoD releases are taking longer to make and costing more to produce though; the most recent CoD we have numbers for, which was a number of years ago at this point, cost $700M to make, and that was the most expensive one at the time. They used to have two studios alternating releases every other year. Now there are three studios on a rotation with about a dozen support studios that all used to make other games, and now they just make CoD.
“Charging more” is where this gets ambiguous though. A game like Assassin’s Creed charges less these days than it used to, relative to how much content they put in the box. I’m long since checked out of Assassin’s Creed, but I think the average game could stand to be leaner and cost the same in the interest of coming out faster and for less money to produce. That would be called shrinkflation in any other industry, which is the same as charging more.
That’s one of my favorite games of all time. Thematically, the first time you see this scene, it does a lot for the presentation and story. Gameplay wise, I think it’s pretty weak.
Sounds like how a lot of us use streaming television these days, too. The price hikes change the dynamic, for sure. And I also liked Avowed more than Expedition 33.
The plan was to become the Netflix of video games, which they’re about 85-90% short of, so a price increase isn’t going to help that, and they know it.
Even if you play every day one release, there’s hardly one of those per month. The math used to work out, for a long time, that one month of Game Pass was about 1/4 of the cost of a full priced new release, so going for a subscription made some kind of sense for a certain kind of consumer. This is a hard sell.
The whole point of running an event like this in the first place is that’s an enormous ad for the video game that they sell. Putting up a paywall in front of it just seems counter productive.