Various video game stuff not deserving its own thread

[Val the Moofia Boss]

https://youtube.com/@jason-schreier

Jewson Schreier made a YouTube channel

Why Video Games Cost So Much To Make

Video game development is cheaper than ever and anyone who says otherwise is just lying.

Can someone summarise the video? I'm usually one to overlook qualities as voice or what have you in most cases, but he sounds like a complete ****** and my cortisol keeps spiking.

It is nothing we have not already heard before.

Cost = number of employees x wages x time. Western AAA games have hundreds of people working for 5 to 7 years.

Western games industry believes that they need to make prisitine, high fidelity photorealistic games with open worlds. That requires an extraordinary amount of manhours to produce.

Most of the Western AAA game dev studios are located in areas with high cost of living, like California. Even though the devs are not paid well, it is still relatively a lot more compared to other countries. You can hire 3 or 4 Chinese devs for 1 American.

There are leadership problems where the game languishes in development for years without a clear vision, and devs are spending months working on stuff only for it to get thrown out because the vision changed.

The standard procedure is to fire/layoff almost everyone after a project is finished rather than keep them on payroll until the next project spins up. So just as a team has been starting to gel together, it gets broken up and people have to reform new teams for new projects and they don't gel together yet. As opposed to just sticking together and growing together

[ThulsaDoomer]

It is nothing we have not already heard before.

Cost = number of employees x wages x time. Western AAA games have hundreds of people working for 5 to 7 years.

Western games industry believes that they need to make prisitine, high fidelity photorealistic games with open worlds. That requires an extraordinary amount of manhours to produce.

Most of the Western AAA game dev studios are located in areas with high cost of living, like California. Even though the devs are not paid well, it is still relatively a lot more compared to other countries. You can hire 3 or 4 Chinese devs for 1 American.

There are leadership problems where the game languishes in development for years without a clear vision, and devs are spending months working on stuff only for it to get thrown out because the vision changed.

The standard procedure is to fire/layoff almost everyone after a project is finished rather than keep them on payroll until the next project spins up. So just as a team has been starting to gel together, it gets broken up and people have to reform new teams for new projects and they don't gel together yet. As opposed to just sticking together and growing together

Thanks Val. Seems so.

They have the ability to correct these mistakes but as we know from the entertainment industry, why solve budget problems when everyone wants it to continue to get that higher wage, even if it destroys the industry in the process. Game developers these days are much like actors, they both attended theatre class and see only themselves in every project. Worse that now stories exist not to portray higher ideas or just for a simple fun experience, they exist to **** off the chuds and all the rest of their ideological rivals. Art now acts as a form of revenge against society. And this ****** was part of that apparatus, just like TIm Cain, and absolutely would not want it to change if they can keep getting their slice.

[rusty_shackleford]

I just can't figure out why developers can't make games anymore.

lets-appreciate-original-wow-developers-2000-2004-and-what-v0-xbkkicx3r5w11.jpg

nbnru5jcn0r31.jpg

What could it possibly be that changed?

[Tangerine]

Everything that becomes popular with women turns to ****.

[Acrux]

Everything that becomes popular with women turns to ****.

I agree. I used to be popular with women.

[Vaako]

Looks like GTA6 will get delayed again soon. Not that I care.
https://rockstarintel.com/gta-6-develop ... mes-union/

[TND]

https://youtube.com/@jason-schreier

Jewson Schreier made a YouTube channel

Why Video Games Cost So Much To Make

Video game development is cheaper than ever and anyone who says otherwise is just lying.

Can someone summarise the video? I'm usually one to overlook qualities as voice or what have you in most cases, but he sounds like a complete ****** and my cortisol keeps spiking.

Gemini summary with some cleanup from Claude, I did not last 4 minutes which is why I posted it here.

► Show Spoiler

```
Why AAA Games Now Cost $300M-$500M+ to Make
Summary of Jason Schreier's video

---

Journalist Jason Schreier breaks down the economic realities behind skyrocketing AAA game
budgets, and pushes back on some common misconceptions along the way.

---

CORE COST DRIVERS

Personnel is the #1 expense
Unlike film, which cycles staff in and out, game development requires a large, dedicated team
working together for years. (1:43-2:23)

Rising "Burn Rates"
The cost to maintain one employee -- salary, benefits, and overhead -- has climbed from
~$10,000/month in 2015 to $15,000-$20,000/month today in major tech hubs. (2:35-8:30)

Extended Development Timelines
Projects that once took 3 years now commonly span 5-6. Multiply 400+ people by a high monthly
burn rate over those extra years, and costs balloon into the hundreds of millions. (5:00-7:20)

The Math in Practice
In high-cost hubs like San Francisco or Seattle -- where studios compete with Meta, Google, and
Anthropic for engineering talent -- a $20,000 burn rate across 400 people means $8 million
spent every single month, whether the team is in full production or spinning its wheels in
pre-production. Over just four years, that alone exceeds $384 million. Five or six years pushes
it well past $500 million. Budget "bloat" at this scale is often a mathematical inevitability,
not a symptom of mismanagement. (7:20-10:40)

The "Pre-production Dreamland" Problem
Some studios compound this further by spending two or more years in pre-production without a
clear direction -- a genuinely wasteful pattern that meaningfully inflates final budgets.
(10:40-10:55)

The Billion-Dollar Hypothetical
To illustrate the extreme end, Schreier runs a thought experiment: a 1,000-person studio in
San Francisco at a $20,000 burn rate over 5 years of development could realistically reach
$1.2 billion. (13:40-14:35)

---

MISCONCEPTIONS

It's not laziness or greed
Schreier addresses the common online sentiment blaming developers for being "lazy" or executives
for being "greedy." While those cases exist, the primary driver is the economic reality of 2026
-- intense competition for engineering talent and the high cost of living in major tech hubs.
(12:50-13:17)

---

HOW STUDIOS ARE COPING

Outsourcing & Co-development
Studios are increasingly keeping a small core team in-house while relying on global teams for
specific tasks, avoiding the overhead of full-time, long-term employment across the board.
(11:38-12:15)

Government Tax Credits
Incentives like those offered in Montreal can return a meaningful portion of salary-related
expenses back to the studio -- effectively a large discount on the total budget, making certain
regions far more attractive for large-scale production. (16:17-16:41)

---

TAKEAWAY

Schreier encourages viewers to look past rage-bait headlines: these massive budgets are largely
the result of sustaining hundreds of people through long, complex development cycles -- not
reckless spending.

[Nemesis]

Looks like GTA6 will get delayed again soon. Not that I care.
https://rockstarintel.com/gta-6-develop ... mes-union/

A couple of Items from the union's list of demands:

• Flexible working
• An end to crunch

The game's not coming out until 2030.

[rusty_shackleford]

All that's going to happen is Rockstar will continue ramping down its UK presence.
A lot of workers suck and being unable to fire them makes things worse for everyone

[Faceless_Sentinel]

Looks like GTA6 will get delayed again soon. Not that I care.
https://rockstarintel.com/gta-6-develop ... mes-union/

Screenshot_2026-05-29-18-13-46-36_e4424258c8b8649f6e67d283a50a2cbc.jpg

Pay transparency: Isn't that something that's discussed during the hiring process when signing the employment contract?
Flexible working: what the **** is that supposed to mean?
An end to crunch: I can understand that (the only thing out of all), especially if it is unpaid.

[Tangerine]

Pay transparency means they want to know how much everyone else is making.

[Rienen]

Flexible working: what the **** is that supposed to mean?

I assume it means...
Choosing their own start and finish times, as long as the total hours are met. AKA rolling into work at noon and then staying a few hours after their boss leaves to browse the internet.
...and/or...
Working fully remote or part-time from home. Again, so they can browse the internet while collecting a paycheck.

[asf]

pay transparency is so women can whine they make a fifth of the pay, while doing nothing

[LemonDemonGirl]

This guy's married to an alleged woman but talks like one of the prissiest **** I've ever heard.

The barrier to entry for being a garage dev is lower than ever, but the Industry's overhead has also been getting higher and higher.

So a ****** then.

[Roguey]

This guy's married to an alleged woman but talks like one of the prissiest **** I've ever heard.

The barrier to entry for being a garage dev is lower than ever, but the Industry's overhead has also been getting higher and higher.

So a ****** then.

They allegedly have children, but I dunno, could have adopted.



Very uncanny valley. Definitely looksmatched, lucky guy.

[rusty_shackleford]

what the **** is that thing

[Roguey]

what the **** is that thing

Jewish ?woman?

She's a lawyah too. The two of them are quite a pair of shysters, really living up to the stereotype.

[Finarfin]

This guy's married to an alleged woman but talks like one of the prissiest **** I've ever heard.

The barrier to entry for being a garage dev is lower than ever, but the Industry's overhead has also been getting higher and higher.

So a ****** then.

They allegedly have children, but I dunno, could have adopted.



Very uncanny valley. Definitely looksmatched, lucky guy.

[Oyster Sauce]

Mafia: The Old Country is sooooo ******* boring.

[Oyster Sauce]

Mafia: The Old Country is sooooo ******* boring.

NOTHING HAPPENS AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[roldet]

Continuing my New Vegas playthrough, I immediately opted out from Old World Blues. The tonal shift to wacky sci-fi ******** was just too much—it gave me flashbacks to Fallout 3's Alien DLC. Hopefully, the other DLCs are better.

[Oyster Sauce]

Mafia: The Old Country is sooooo ******* boring.

NOTHING HAPPENS AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

It's not even a video game. voices38 is going to pay for cracking this piece of ****.

[rusty_shackleford]

Mafia: The Old Country is sooooo ******* boring.

NOTHING HAPPENS AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

It's not even a video game. voices38 is going to pay for cracking this piece of ****.

cracks every new game except for the game people actually want to play

[Oyster Sauce]

NOTHING HAPPENS AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

It's not even a video game. voices38 is going to pay for cracking this piece of ****.

cracks every new game except for the game people actually want to play

The game people actually want to play is still being updated

[methoxetamine]

NOTHING HAPPENS AHHHHHHHHHHHHH

It's not even a video game. voices38 is going to pay for cracking this piece of ****.

cracks every new game except for the game people actually want to play

Exactly. Lazy ******* needs to hurry up with Kiwami 3.

[mattig]

This is kinda an old video. y'all ever see it?

[Oyster Sauce]

boring

[Stack of Turtles]

boring

do a review for the HQ

[Oyster Sauce]

boring

do a review for the HQ

Mina The Hollower

It has Dark Souls mechanics tacked on that I sensed would become progressively more tedious, so I became cranky — and quit.

[Stack of Turtles]

boring

do a review for the HQ

Mina The Hollower

It has Dark Souls mechanics tacked on that I sensed would become progressively more tedious, so I became cranky — and quit.

Good start but the style guide says you have to have a conclusions section.