And licensed music, world class voice and mo-cap actors for like 100’s of roles, multiple support studios, a entire department dedicated to accessibility, post-release content, etc.
The standards for making a AAA game today are far different than 15 years ago. Thats why Nintendo has such good margins on their games, they are like AA (or less) in budget and AAA in marketing
You are describing what Take Two has to go through for GTA and 2K . This is not a one size fit all issue for everyone.
Not everyone has to worry about 15-20 radio stations of songs from Dr. Dre, Michael Jackson and Guns N' Roses. Nowadays for most, the goal is to get up and coming artists. Take Arkells' 'You Can Get It' from Forza Horizon 5. That's promo for them so I know the fee was negligible at best.
Not all games need David Hayter, Troy Baker or Nolan North either. Take this for example. Voice acting runs about $300 an hour. A line of script is about one a minute.
Skyrim has 60K lines of script. Equates to 1000 hours of dialogue so say $300000 for voice acting. Now, it was also in 5 languages including English so 1.5M using linear math
Starfield has 150K lines of script. Equates to 2500 hours of dialogue so say $750000 for voice acting. Presuming the same languages, that is 3.75M using linear math
There is a difference but in the grand scheme of things, the difference is static noise. 2.25M is not going to cause Microsoft to clutch their pearls and start checking the couches for pennies.
Motion Capture isn't not that expensive either. However, the larger publishers and developers don't cut costs. Yes, there is a difference between homebrew motion capture and professionally done stuff but most are in the middle. Nowadays, you can do this stuff from an iphone or android device.
This is perhaps the most famous example of getting around costs for motion capture.
They used their working studio and cameras bought from Amazon to make it work.
So, as I was saying. Not every game is bound by these issues. Nintendo games rarely have dialogue and I'd call a handful of them AAA affairs, by their standards. Microsoft owns all pieces of music for Halo because they have musicians on staff at 343. Sony and Microsoft both own motion capture studios.
Stop feeding into that line of bullshyt that these companies try to feed us.
This isn't just for gaming but my point is this. I've sat for years and with plentiful available data, pieced together what these companies tell us vs what I know about finance.
Do costs go up? Yes. Do most companies do enough other things in my opinion to offset those costs? Yes.
The problem is for a lot of the larger companies, that take 4+ years to build these games is that they don't go into it with a laser focus of how to get from point A to point B. From listening to fans vs trying new things, wasting years of development (Halo Infinite), Changing to a new game mid development. (The original Resident Evil 4 to Devil May Cry 1) Corporate and Leadership middling (Bioshock Infinite), these development studios burn through money, scrapping things that have already been created.
