What we really want to know is why: What’s causing this rise? Take a 2015 game and a 2025 one of the same genre, with the same ambition: does that game really cost more to make today? Or are we simply building different (more ambitious) games now? Solodevs ship multiplayer 3D games that would’ve taken a full studio not so long ago. Meanwhile, AAA now involve hundreds, if not thousands, of workers for up to a decade. And kitchen sink games are becoming a thing.

We already proved that inflation is a major culprit (+28% compounded since 2017), but it’s far from enough to explain the full story. From here on, every figure is inflation-adjusted, so we can focus on the remaining drivers of this increase.

A heads-up: this topic is not trivial, so this article’s a hairy one. We wanted to go deep, but we also wanted to keep it digestible. If you’d rather skip the details, the conclusion is waiting for you at the bottom.

Bigger scope or bigger teams?

“Salaries are up. Games are more complex. Teams are bigger. Projects take longer.” That’s the usual narrative for the cost rise. It’s all true BUT too vague. Two different stories might hide in there. In one, games genuinely got more ambitious, and bigger games cost more. In the other, making the same game now eats more people and time than it used to. If we can’t tell them apart, we end up fixing the wrong problem.

So when budgets rise, how much of it is the game itself getting bigger, and how much is everything else? We decompose each year’s budget change into three pieces: scope (games actually getting more ambitious and complex, in ways we can measure), team size (more or fewer people, holding scope equal), and a residual that captures everything we can’t systematically observe across 100k+ games (efficiency gains, tooling, AI, graphical fidelity, mismanagement).

The decomposition follows DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996). We reweight each year’s releases so their scope and team-size distributions match the 2016–2018 baseline. The gap between reweighted and baseline is the “other” residual. The gap between actual and reweighted budgets splits into scope and team.1

For Kei and Midi, scope kept expanding year after year. Team size, by contrast, has been contracting since 2023, working against the budget rise.

For AA and AAA, scope has plateaued (and even contracted) since 2023, while team costs kept rising. The 2023–2024 layoff waves may push team sizes down further in the future, when labor shrinkage will finally surface in new games’ credits. “Other” turns out to be the single biggest downward force on AA+ budgets. By definition, it’s the factors we do not observe, but we can speculate it’s driven by efficiency gains (better tooling, shared asset libraries, AI). There is a dip in team size from 2020 to 2021, almost certainly a composition artifact: COVID delayed many large releases to 2022+, leaving those years skewed toward smaller productions.

We have a scoop: it’s scope

If we tally it all up, we can say this: inflation aside, it doesn’t cost more to make games. We just make bigger ones.

First, scope expansion alone is the main factor that can explain the average budget rise. Second, scope rise doubled costs across every game category.

For Kei and Midi, scope expansion did not scale with team size. In fact, it’s the opposite. They are pulling off bigger scopes with fewer people.

For AA & AAA, team size seemed to outgrow scope, meaning it now takes more people to ship the same product than it used to. Still, this could be entirely explained by scope rise that we can’t measure (e.g., motion capture isn’t visible in our data. If a game uses it, we just observe more people in the credits and might mistake it for plain team inflation). The sole downward force is the residual factors, reducing budget by $7M. It could come from unmeasurable scope cuts (e.g., a trim in graphical ambition), or genuine efficiency gains. Probably a bit of both. Either way, without those quiet savings, AA+ budgets would have grown even faster than they already did.

Why did team size expansion drive cost up so much for AA+ titles and not for small ones? What do those studios do differently with their teams?

This is part of our Budget series, breaking down the costs of making games.

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The Great Specialization

First, they specialized. We looked at the variety of distinct job titles in game credits since 2015: it has increased, for everyone. A decade ago, the typical AAA listed fewer than 30 distinct roles. Today, 35% of AAA credits list more than 50. The trend reached lower tiers too but to a lesser extent. Besides, that might mostly be an increasing use of outsourcing: what used to be a single “Developed by” line now splits across external localization, art, or music.

This job title expansion is probably due to both a rise in the complexity of games, and maturity of the industry. Cinema went through the same pattern, with new roles emerging alongside technical innovations.2

Wait, isn’t specialization supposed to make things cheaper? You get good at one thing, you do it faster, costs go down. Except that logic only works for repetitive and predictable work. Game development is the exact opposite. Nothing is repetitive, dependencies are everywhere, and stuff breaks constantly. In that kind of work, gains from increased specialization are eaten by the costs of coordination.3 A solodev who’s blocked on one task can pivot to another. The animator has to wait for the rigger to ship the new skeleton.

Coordination tax

Second, they hire managers. The growing specialization of organizations makes coordination a real challenge. Consequently, the share of credits with managerial titles evolved hand-in-hand with scope.

In AA and AAA productions, 14% to 17% of credits are management roles.4 That’s 1 in 7 people whose job is to manage other people. For Midi games, it’s below 1 in 10. For Kei, obviously, it’s a flat 0% because solodevs don’t credit themselves as ‘Senior Director of Loneliness’.

The real shift is in AA: their management share doubled over the last decade. From under 10% (Midi territory) to 15–17%, now matching AAA. Coordination is a tax. It raises costs without raising output. It’s likely why labor cost hits AA+ budgets so hard.

No more free overtime?

Lastly, there might also be a quieter force at play: (hopefully) studios are gradually moving away from crunch culture. The same workload requires more people, not because anyone got slower, but because companies stopped extracting unpaid overtime. This hits AA+ harder because that’s where crunch was most entrenched. Matthew Ball briefly touched on this in his 2024 State of the Industry.

So that’s the historical picture: why budgets grew over the last decade. But if you’re a studio planning your next game or a publisher funding one, what you care about is what each piece of the puzzle actually costs today. A 3D game vs a 2D one, what’s the price tag? Adding multiplayer? Hiring more managers?

What shifts game development costs

The strongest predictor of budget is team size.5 Games with teams twice as large come with budgets ~70% higher on average. Worth distinguishing: labor wasn’t what pushed budgets up over the decade (scope was). Still, team size has always been the best predictor of how much a game costs. Doubling just the managers adds another 32%.

On the design side, the menu has clear price tags. A 2D game is 32% cheaper than its 3D equivalent. As Kei games are more and more 3D, that’s likely one of the main drivers of their scope increase. Multiplayer comes with ~+20% for the added complexity. Doubling the playtime leads to +24% budget. And having any voiced audio adds ~70%.

Production choices matter too. Self-publishing games trim ~20% off the bill (as we’ve speculated before, it could be a drop in resource investment efficiency). Co-development adds ~22% as coordination across teams is never free.

Want to benchmark your own project against these numbers? We packaged our model into the Budget Compass, a web app where you plug in your project features and get a predicted budget against the average for comparable games. It doesn't just give you a single number, but the full range of plausible budgets for projects like yours, from the most optimistic scenarios to the most demanding ones. It’s sharper on <$7M projects. It’s in alpha and reserved for our paid subscribers.

Unlock 4 months free by sharing some insights about your released (or soon-to-be-released) game. It helps us improve our benchmarks. We verify submissions within 24h, and all figures are protected under NDA. Get started here.

More ambitious games, not costlier ones

In the last decade, budgets have been rising across all scopes. Inflation played a part, but the bigger truth is that making the same game we used to make 10 years ago doesn’t cost more today. What’s been pushing budgets up is the never-ending chase for bigger scope.

Small studios pulled off bigger games with fewer hands. Bigger ones got specialized teams, hired more managers, and started paying for hours that crunch culture used to extract for free. Efficiency gains offset some of that, but not enough to cancel it out. That’s the why. Then we looked at the what: people, by far, are what moves the budget up (doubling the team adds 70%, doubling the managers another 32%). As for the rest, going 3D adds 32%. Going multiplayer, 20%. Voiced audio, 70%.

That being said, if you’ve been paying close attention, you know something is missing. We’ve been talking about team size the whole way through, never about paychecks. Inflation lifted everything by 28% in less than a decade, but did video-game salaries move with the broader economy, or did they pull ahead? If the cost of each developer has been climbing faster, that would be another driver hiding inside the “team” bucket we’ve been measuring.

Good news: we’ve gathered 4,600+ salary records from the past five years, across regions and seniorities. Subscribe to find out what it reveals.

“Development budgets have skyrocketed.” So the story goes. Everyone nods along.

But what does that actually mean? Did budgets really skyrocket, across every scope and genre? By how much? Since when? Does it hit solodevs the same way it hits AAAs?

In a previous post, we explained how we built a model to estimate the budget of all games on Steam (if you needed a reason to trust those estimates, Jason Schreier has since reported real figures that fall right in line with ours).

What follows is our attempt to put real numbers behind the rumors. Our 2026 and 2027 forecasts are at the end.

$27B spent on developing games in 2025

The video game industry has never been so big. The cumulated budgets of every games released on Steam in 2025 sum up to an all-time record of $27 billion. That’s five times what it was a decade ago, and x2.7 what is was in 2019 (x2.2 after adjusting for inflation).

For perspective: total spending on feature films and series in 2025 sits just above $40 billion. This means PC game budgets alone are the equivalent of 67% of the entire filmed fiction market.

A growth that big has two potential drivers: more games are made, or games are costlier. The number of releases doubled between 2019 and 2025. The likely reason is the surge in a new generation of solo developers during the COVID era. If they started during lockdown, a first wave of shipped games would have landed in 2021-2022.

So, volume alone explains a lot, but not all of it. Are individual games getting more expensive to make?

Stonks

When you look at the average budget per game, the same increase holds. Between 2019 and 2025, the average development cost almost doubled. Without inflation, 2025 budgets would have been 28% lower.

Costs started climbing sharply from 2022 onward, boosted by inflation. This aligns well with the first games doped by the large post-covid investment and a 2-3 years development cycle lag.

So here you know: budgets are genuinely rising and not just because of inflation.

Still, as the volume of Kei/solodevs games exploded in the last decade, looking at the market average is pretty much like watching the evolution of solodevs. Each scope level might have very different patterns.

Harder, Bitter, Longer, Costlier

Across all scopes, games are more expensive to make. And the bigger the scope, the higher the rise. AA & AAA budgets tripled in the last decade, while smaller scopes still hit a respectable x2.5. The general figure is clear, still some interesting details are worth noting.

If “Kei” and “Midi” don’t ring a bell, we defined four data-driven categories of game scope in a previous article: Kei (solodev-scale), Midi (small studios), AA, and AAA.

Kei budgets were essentially flat until 2021, then doubled in four years.

Midi and AA both show a correction in 2025, after years of steady increases. The general trend remains the same, though.

As for AAA, the jump in budgets is gigantic in absolute terms: from ~$100M in 2019 to nearly $300M in 2025. We’re now talking about AAAs that rival the Cook Islands’ GDP!

Here’s our take on this global increase, beyond the usual “labor costs got higher” explanation. As the video game industry becomes more of a winner-takes-all market, every studio competes for the same finite resource: player’s attention. One title captures it, the rest are forgotten. This wasn’t always that potent: console exclusives used to scatter competition across separate submarkets; marketing depended on local diffusion (journalists, print magazines, retail stores). That fragmentation created room for multiple winners. Today, the market is converging toward a single arena (Nintendo being the stubborn exception).

The increased competition makes every game fight to be the one left standing. But not every studio fights the same war. Small-scope games and big-scope ones differentiate in completely different ways, and that’s what explains the budget gap.

Lower-scope games differentiate horizontally (original mechanics, unusual art, untapped themes). Doing so, it’s like they’re creating their own niche (partially escaping the competition) while not having to spend that much more. Think Disco Elysium, or Return of the Obra Dinn.

Meanwhile, AA & AAA differentiate vertically: more content, more realism, more skins, more of everything, in an unstoppable quality ladder. So any efficiency gain (better engines, AI pipelines) doesn’t translate into cheaper games. It makes them more ambitious and expensive. The result is an arms race where spending explodes.

Virtual Reality, Real Costs

VR costs top the chart with a x4.3 increase in seven years. Budgets were flat until 2021, then exploded. Likely due to the 2021–2022 VC wave and metaverse hype that finally landed games in 2024. This is probably not driven by popularity, but by the mix of technical cost of building convincing virtual worlds, and the expected gold rush. Leaving reality is not cheap.

Action-Adventure (×2.8) and Free to Play (×2.3) escalated for a different reason. These are among the most popular genres, and as expected, when competition grows fierce, you need to spend more to get attention.

Point & Click, at the other end, has gotten cheaper. It’s now a genre made by small teams who’ve found ways to do more with less, or simply decided to do less. Not every budget was doomed to point skyward.

In short, budget increases have concentrated mainly on the most popular genres, where competition is the fiercest.

To be or not to be (self-published)?

Whether a game is backed by a publisher or self-published doesn’t only change who pays, it changes how much is spent. We’ve already touched on why here (principal-agent problem and all). But the picture gets a lot more interesting when you break it down by scope over time.

For Kei games, the publisher gap remains stubborn. A publisher-backed Kei game has roughly twice the budget of a fully independent production. This gap has remained particularly stable over time.

For Midi games, the picture is different. While there was a visible gap in the past, it closed around 2021. A decade ago, publisher-backed Midi games had budgets roughly 1.5 times higher than self-published counterparts.

Our best explanation so far is that above a given budget, the role of a publisher changes. For smaller scopes, signing with a publisher is transformative: it unlocks localization, QA, or more generally a boost in production value by letting the devs work longer on the project. Above a given threshold (we found it at around $500k), the difference between making it on a publisher’s money or yours starts blurring. Below it, the publisher adds ambition, above it, it “simply” makes the project feasible.

Meanwhile for AAA, the publisher question never mattered. The two curves have been tangled together for the entire decade. At this scale, the distinction is mostly artificial: most AAA studios are owned by their publisher anyway. Whether it’s CD Projekt shipping on its own dime, or Infinity Ward doing it under Activision doesn't make much of a difference.

So, budgets are going up. Across scopes, popular genres, and publishing models. If you felt that before, now you know it for a fact.

But “budgets are rising” is like saying “the patient has a fever.” Useful but not sufficient. What we want to know is: what’s causing it? We answered that here.

To the moon

One question remains: what will happen next? The waves of layoffs and AI adoption might suggest budgets are about to shrink. Our forecasts tell another story.

The end?
Forecasts up to 2027 and the ability to export each chart’s aggregated yearly data are reserved to paid subscribers. No budget for a subscription? Help us improve our benchmarks by sharing some insights about your released (or soon to be released) game and unlock 4 months of free access. We verify submissions within 24h, and all sensitive figures are strictly protected under NDA. Get started here.

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TL;DR: Steam regional pricing recommendations are broken, so we build this free tool to fix it.

Steam’s regional pricing recommendations are broken. We didn’t even realize how broken it was until we read the recent GDCo Newsletter and numerous other articles discussing it. So we decided to take a detour from our usual market analysis articles to fix this issue.

Relying on Steam regional pricing is like using a water filter: you think you’re doing the right thing, but it’s hurting you if you don’t replace the cartridge often. And this one is three years old, yuck!

Why is it broken?

Steam recommendations have not been updated since 2022. In big 25, this is unbelievable. It creates significant aberrations. For instance, Polish players (2.3% of steam traffic) pay 26% more than Americans for the same game, even though their income is twice as low.

Conversely, this outdated data can lead to examples where a wealthy country ends up paying less than it arguably should. For instance, Australian players likely benefit from a permanent 5% sale on their games with Steam pricing given their purchasing power.

Why does it matter?

Why should you even care about regional pricing being “unfair”? Let’s be clear: Adapting your prices to regional economic realities isn’t charity. It is, first and foremost, a question of profit.

When following current Steam recos, you are very likely to lose money by:

• Overpricing your game, which pushes potential customers towards grey markets or other entertainment options (e.g., Poland).

• Underpricing your game, which leads to lost revenue (e.g., Australia).

It’s shocking that a tool so critical to a game’s success—one developers often use without a second thought—is so broken. Steam deserves props for offering this regional pricing tool in the first place (they didn’t have to!), but its lack of updates is now actively costing devs money and frustrating players.

The solution

To address this critical problem, we developed this tool:

Better Steam Regional Pricing

You simply input your desired USD price, and our tool generates regional prices based on up-to-date economic data. You can then export a ready-to-use CSV file for direct import into your Steamworks.

If your game is already live, please be mindful of two Steam rules:
1. You cannot change your price while an active discount is running, or while one is scheduled in the future.
2. If your new regional pricing results in any increase (even in just one currency), you’ll have to wait 30 days before applying any discount.

If your game hasn’t been released yet, none of this apply. Simply import the CSV and all your prices will be perfectly set for launch day.

That’s it. If you want to know more about regional pricing and what we did, you can keep reading.

What is regional pricing?

Regional pricing is not solely about converting your price to local currency, it’s about adapting it. A $12 game in the U.S., where the median daily income is around $70, cannot reasonably be sold 63 BRL in Brazil (the direct currency equivalent), where the median daily income is only 84 BRL!

So, how should we handle that? Well, Steam actually was on the right track:

“

Rather than just pegging prices to foreign exchange rates, our process for price suggestions goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of what players pay for the goods and services in their lives. This includes metrics like purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, which help compare prices and costs more broadly across a bunch of different economic sectors. But in the case of games on Steam, we also drill down more specifically to entertainment purchasing to better inform those decisions." Steam

So, let’s do the same. But how can we really know what things cost in each country?

Purchasing Power Parity

The local prices we’re targeting are those that reflect the same purchasing power across countries. Going back to our earlier example, the goal is to find a Brazilian price that feels equivalent to the U.S. one, meaning it represents roughly the same amount of goods people can buy. For instance, $12 might get you a movie ticket in the suburb of a medium-sized U.S. city, while it barely costs $5 in central São Paulo - the largest city in Brazil.1 So, we want to adjust our price so that it matches what people can actually buy locally. In other words, we’re looking for a conversion rate that equalizes purchasing power between the two countries.

Of course, figuring this out manually can be time-consuming. Luckily, statistical agencies already do this work for us. They track the prices of representative baskets of goods to make international comparisons, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) compiles all this data into what’s called a Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) conversion rate.2 According to it, one U.S. dollar buys the same things as 2.55 Brazilian Reals. So, if your game costs $12 (incl. taxes) in the U.S., it should be priced around 12 × 2.55 = 30.6 BRL — just under $6.3

Our tool automates this entire process and gives you the most up-to-date prices for all Steam regions.

As a side note, you should be aware that having regional pricing inherently carries the risk of some exploiting lower prices in certain areas. However, this shouldn’t discourage you from adopting a good regional pricing strategy.

We also offer an exclusive feature: you can set your prices using the same regional pricing strategy as Netflix - a multi-billion-dollar company that’s likely spent significantly more time on this problem than you and us. Using differences in Netflix’s regional prices for their standard plan, we derive an implied conversion rate (similar to The Economist’s famous Big Mac Index) that you can use to set your price. It’s updated monthly. Think about that: you get access to the pricing intelligence of Netflix, for free!

All good now?

Sadly no: Steam made a questionable choice by grouping multiple countries under a single price. This “one-size-fits-all” approach completely ignores massive economic disparities:

For countries in the European Union (EU), developers must set a single price in euros (even for countries that do not use euros, e.g., Denmark). Consequently, this unified pricing fails to account for the substantial differences in purchasing power between countries. For instance, the purchasing power in Denmark versus Portugal is vastly different. [EDIT: Steam decision seems to be related to “anti-geo-blocking” EU regulation]

Besides, Steam chose to group together countries that share a geographical region but use disparate currencies, under a single USD price designation: USD_LATAM (for Latin American countries), USD_CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), USD_MENA (Middle East and North Africa), and USD_SASIA (South Asia). Don’t get us wrong: Setting a USD price to currencies that have a high volatility of exchange rates is a great idea. What’s problematic here is the pooling together of countries with great wealth disparities. For instance, Argentina’s purchasing power is 70% higher than Bolivia’s, but developers can only set a unique USD price for both.

Ideally, developers would be able to set a unique USD price in each individual country.

Since we can’t undo those Steam’s choices, our tool weights the PPP conversion rate by Steam traffic for prices shared across multiple countries. It’s not perfect—we still disagree with the ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy—but it’s the best way to address those massive economic disparities right now.

Yet, this is one of the hardest data to get. Everyone is quick to talk about sales (especially when glorious). There are even widely-known models to predict a game’s sales from Steam reviews. The budgets needed to make those games, however, often remain the greatest unknown in the equation. You’ll find no budgets database, and very few public announcements.1 All you’ll find are rumors and whimsical estimates.

No wonder this topic stirs up such a great passion among players and professionals.

Players love sneaking this data on forums and subreddits: they are eager to judge a game’s value-to-budget ratio and compare spending across games.

As for professionals (developers, publishers, investors), they crave benchmarks. “How do other studios handle this?”, “What genres are the most budget-demanding?”.

So, everyone wants to know! Yet, no one knows. That’s what motivated us to create HushCrasher 1 year ago. True to our mission, we used data science to predict the budget of all games on Steam. Here are our results.

Making a budget prediction model

Where does this budget data come from, you may ask? That’s a fair question because finding reliable budget figures is a hell of a hard task. Sources are scattered, journalists relay ballpark estimates; and half of the time, you won’t know if marketing is included (which can double the budget for AAA).

That did not stop us. We spent weeks scavenging web archives, news articles, data leaks, post-mortems, and forums. We also consulted some industry contacts, who generously—and confidentially—agreed to share their financial data.

But that wasn’t enough. Our dataset was nowhere big enough to draw direct conclusions about industry-wide trends. Good news is, there was light at the end. Our dataset was big enough to train a machine learning model that would generate budget estimates for every single game available on Steam.

To make our results as precise as possible, we needed to feed the model with predictors of costs. We aim to protect our ‘secret sauce’ but here’s a taste of some key ingredients: credit length, publisher’s and studio’s experience, variety of distinct job titles, supported languages, and dozens of other variables.

For such a complex task, our model achieves a high level of accuracy, predicting the actual budget within a 10% margin, on average, for now.2

We ended up with budget estimates for around 100,000 games. In this article, we present our results for the recent period of 2022–2025 and exclude games with fewer than 10 reviews. This leaves us with 19,634 games.

We owe this data to the generous developers who shared their figures. If you believe in our mission to give a better understanding of the industry, please join our effort! Submit your game budget information here. Security first: your figures will be protected by an NDA, ensuring they’ll never be shared or sold.

Tell me your scope, I’ll tell you how much you’ll spend

If you’re not familiar with Midi and Kei, check our previous article where we explain how the common categorization (indie, III, AA, AAA) was flawed, and why we had to make a better one.

Kei game developers clearly know how need to keep costs low—half of them do it for less than $65k. This mainly reflects developers’ cost of living and location. Braid, for example, costed $200k because its developer, Jonathan Blow “didn’t want to live in a shack somewhere“. Meanwhile, Eldritch, the 2013 Lovecraft inspired FPS cost a total of $22k. Its developer David Pittman also explained that “the primary cost [...] was the burn rate of my own living expenses [...]”.

As for Midi games, their budget box might look like they’re chilling with the Kei one, but don’t be fooled—that overlap only concerns the data points outside the 75th percentile. The medians show the real story: making a Midi game is actually 14 times as pricey as a Kei game.

Indeed, cost is doomed to increase with a larger team and proper company structure. For instance, Thimbleweed Park—a 2017 point-and-click—ended up costing no less than 1M$ according to Ron Gilbert.

Stepping up your scope will scale your costs exponentially: the median cost of AAs is 33x that of Midi games, and the AAAs is 10x that of AAs. With games getting more complex, it’s no surprise that Black Ops Cold War cost $700M, almost 9 times the $82M already required for Spider-Man: Miles Morales.3 While it hasn’t always been the case, AAA games now fully rival the biggest US cinema blockbusters. It’s even fair to say they now go far beyond it.

Engine War

It’s stunning that Godot is one of Unity’s biggest challengers for small-scope (<$100k) games. It’s David—the open-source tool—against Goliath, the billion(!)-dollar financed software. It’s fair to say that David got a booster in 2023 when Unity changed its pricing model. While it was fully reversed barely a year later, the trust was broken, and it gave a lasting bonus to Godot, now on the edge to overcome GameMaker.

For Unreal, the cliché that it’s mainly for large projects still holds true. Kei successes like Manor Lords might convince other. Currently, Unreal leads the high-budget game market, holding more than half of its share.

The true challenger to Unity and Unreal resides in the “Other” category. For projects with small budgets, it’s a diverse array of open-source solutions and custom engines. Conversely, at the high end, “Other” mainly defines proprietary, in-house engines—like Rockstar’s RAGE, Bethesda’s Creation Engine (though they transitioned to Unreal for the Oblivion remaster), or the impressive Decima Engine from Guerrilla Games.

The cost of (creative) freedom

Partnering with a publisher is rarer than you might think: only 23% of developers do so. When they do, it’s more than just shifting costs from self-funding to external finance. Ultimately, it results in a higher development budget, x3 to x4 on average.

This increase could mean several things:

• The spending jump may not reflect only a step-up in the final scope, but also a drop in resource investment efficiency: Publisher money might be invested less efficiently than developers’ own capital, this is known as the principal-agent problem.4 Or it might be the inevitable added cost of a professional relationship (meetings, reporting, having to justify why this step is late on top of already being late, etc.).

• This extra money could be the necessary investment to achieve a successful game. Does it? We’ll have to cross-check this against commercial success metrics. Count on us.

2D to 3D: a dime’s worth difference?

Making 3D games might have been impossible for small teams in the past, but it’s no longer the case. We now see 3D games of all budgets, from PSX stylized horror Kei to ultra realistic AAA. The large average difference in cost (3D games are 16 times costlier!) is mainly because 2D games rarely get past over $1M budgets.

A multi(player)-million dollar business

However, multiplayer games are more likely to break the million-dollar mark. While they account for only 16% of all games, they make up half of the market for budgets above $10M. This gap highlights how single player games are relatively scarce for big studios.

Conclusion

Here is a snapshot of today’s budget. Now, to get a complete picture of this subject, there’s still a lot to investigate.

First, we could wonder how those budgets have evolved over time. Have game budgets really skyrocketed over the years like everyone says? And did it concern all games or just a specific category? Spoiler: The bigger the scope, the higher the rise of budgets: x2.5 for small scopes, x3 for AA & AAA in 10 years. Full breakdown here:

Secondly, besides correlations, it would be interesting to know how creative and technical decisions impact costs. How much does a budget increase when making it 3D vs 2D? How much more does each new team member really cost in the end? Is the marginal cost of a worker stable as the game size increase? Some answers here:

Finally, the budgets can differ greatly between countries, and it might be insightful to look back at those figures knowing where the people behind those games are based.

Those are all food for thought, and might be the topic of our next articles, so don’t forget to subscribe if you want to stay updated.

The problem is: at HushCrasher, we believe that a serious discussion of the video game industry, from its financial health to its creative trends, requires a common framework. That's why we had to go down the rabbit hole of finding a clear and objective method to classify games, and finally conclude that using the word "indie" should be banned.

Guess Who?

HushCrasher is a scream of rage against .·✩·.¸¸.·¯⍣✩intuition✩⍣¯·.¸¸.·✩·. -based theories. Therefore, any vibe-analysis is clearly out of the question. If only there were a way to identify games that share a similar scope without making any preconceived assumptions. The good news is there is a whole strand of data science dedicated to finding groups of similar elements based on their characteristics, known as clustering.

First, we've gathered data from all games published on Steam since 2006, and enhanced it with credits from Mobygames, a crowdsourced database on games and the people who made it. Second, we looked at characteristics that could serve as indicators of a game's scope (length and diversity of the credits, disk usage, number of available languages, etc.). Finally, we ran a clustering algorithm to identify distinct game categories, as detailed in our research paper.

It turns out the main factors to classify a game are the length of its credits and its disk size, far outweighing all the other metrics! And it makes sense, those two measures are tightly linked to the amount of work that was involved in making the game. Based on our methodology, we identify 4 distinct categories of games:

- The Kei games. Those are what many would call 'solodev' games. Popular examples are Undertale, Papers Please, or Terraria. While they are often the work of a lone creator, they can also be made by a couple of friends or siblings. The term "Kei" captures this sense of small-scale, in reference to Japan's famously tiny car.

- The Midi games. Those are made by small and medium studios. Think of games like Hades and Valheim. These are in between the intimacy of Kei games and the larger ambition of AAs.

- The AA games. This is the entry point for multi-million-dollar budgets. They are developed by large teams with hundreds of credited individuals, including contractors, and a growing number of middle management and support staff (HR, finance, etc.).

- The AAA games. Here, sky's the limit. Let's just say that if a few thousands of people worked on the game and you had to buy a new SSD to install it, chances are it's a AAA.

Together they form the Hushcrasher Classification System™ 1.0 (HCS). It's a tool designed to cut through the noise, categorizing games by the length of their credits and the game size. And just like that, we've invented 2 new labels for game categories. Do we hope they go mainstream? Hell yeah! If you wish to classify a game by yourself, follow our guide.

Now that you know who's who let's see what we could learn from the last decade to better understand what's coming next.

Indie and the Temple of Doom

"Why are there no Indie category?" you may ask. Because one could award "indie" the most confusing term ever in video games. While everyone seems to agree that solodev, AA, and AAA largely refer to game scopes, this is not the case for indie games. When speaking of it, people mix in lots of others characteristics: aesthetics ("indie vibe"), creative or financial freedom, team size, IP, and intention (making games "for the sake of it").3 A good example of this is the recent confusion around Dave the Diver. For instance, if you think that 'indie' means being self-published, you might be surprised to learn that:

• A quarter of AAA games are self-published (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed, and GTA)

• At least a quarter of Kei & Midi games, which are the types of games people would typically call 'indie', have a publisher.

We told you, this whole 'indie means self-published' is just flawed.

The Indiepocalypse Keipocalypse

In the last decade, it became possible for anyone to develop and publish a game - since the Steam Direct program in 2017, getting your game on the platform only requires a $100 fee. Naturally, competition grew fierce. We've seen a massive surge in Kei games, sometimes referred to as the indiepocalypse. The number of Kei game releases has been multiplied by 16 in a matter of years. Today, they account for more than 7 out of 10 releases. This is without a doubt the greatest transformation in this industry over the past decade. Meanwhile, the share of A-games hasn't diminished, representing a stable 3% of all published games.

Sure, there are more Kei games available, but are people actually buying them? The truth is: the shock was so important that the market simply couldn't absorb it. Despite making up 75% of new releases in 2024, the share of reviews (a good proxy for sales) allocated to Kei games hasn't changed for a decade. It remained remarkably stable, never getting above ~25%.

Of course, not all games are created equal. Many are never played; in fact, 4 out of 10 games released in 2024 haven't even received ten reviews.4 Some are likely bad, but most are certainly just less visible, lost in the overwhelming flood of competing titles. This is where the real picture comes in: Kei games have definitely swamped the market, but they haven't exactly taken away the sales. If there's competition, it’s among Kei games themselves. What we're seeing is an almost perfect split: each segment claiming a quarter of the market.

With a flood of new games and no change in market share, the median revenue per game collapsed by an astounding 97%—from $80k in 2012 to below $3k in 2018.5

On a more positive note, the "Keipocalypse" is not just about destruction. The very same factors that led to market saturation—lower entry costs and facilitated distribution—have also led to a remarkable diversification of the industry. Developers can now create titles for very specific niches, knowing that even a few hundred sales can make the project worthwhile.

Legend of Leagues

Players won't stop buying AAA because of the latest Kei game. In fact, they are probably not even the same players at all (and this might be a story for another time). This segmentation is also reflected in their retail prices, which are almost evenly spaced between each category. A Kei game costs only a few bucks, around $17 for Midi games, $40 for AAs, and $60 for most AAAs available on Steam.

Why don't we get more Open World-Platformers

A game's scope inherently dictates its genre possibilities, which means that by setting that scope, developers often tie their hands creatively. A Kei open-world would be a suicide mission, while hiring thousands of people to create a simple 2D platformer may be interesting, but would certainly be a money pit.

One way to gauge these differences is to look at the game tags that are over-represented or under-represented within each group. This reveals the usual suspects: 'Multiplayer' and 'Co-op' are common for A-games (AA and AAA) while '2D' and 'Pixel-Graphics' are distinctive of smaller scopes. This makes sense from an economic perspective, as the latter are much cheaper to make than the former. However, recent multiplayer Kei-hits such as Lethal Company and Peak might be a turning point.

The choice of scope even goes so far as to influence the type of creative risks a developer is willing to take. For instance, 3% of Kei and Midi games have the 'Experimental' tag, which is almost completely absent from A-games. Meanwhile, 'Remake' accounts for ~5% of premium games - larger studios, with more at stake, often prefer the safer bet of a known success.

AAAs cost 10 times more than AAs

What’s the one thing we can’t leave out when talking about game scope? The budget. It’s time to talk numbers. In our next article, we focus on how much it costs to make a game. Subscribe to our newsletter to be kept updated when new article comes out!