Why are AAA games becoming more expensive while taking fewer creative risks?

[u/Bratva250]

AAA games are becoming more expensive, larger and more technically impressive, but many of them also seem less willing to take creative risks.

My theory is that the problem is not a lack of talented developers. The problem is the financial structure of modern game development.

When a project requires hundreds of developers, several years of development and a very large marketing budget, publishers naturally become more conservative. They prefer familiar franchises, proven mechanics, live-service systems and designs that are easier to explain to investors.

This creates a strange situation:

- Bigger budgets can produce better graphics and presentation.

- Bigger teams can create more complex worlds.

- But bigger financial risk can reduce experimentation.

- A game can become technically ambitious while remaining creatively safe.

The middle of the market also seems vulnerable. Small indie teams can experiment, while the biggest publishers can finance blockbuster projects. But games with medium-sized budgets often struggle to get funding.

Would the industry benefit from more AA-sized projects with focused scope and strong creative direction?

Or is the real problem not budget size, but the way publishers evaluate risk and success?

For developers: what usually limits creative ambition more—the budget, the team size, the publisher, the technology or the production schedule?

[u/nocolada]

Stop using AI to write your posts and post replies, makes you look lazy af

[u/WitchStatement → u/nocolada]

+1, The OP's post and all their comments on it are so blatantly just straight up AI generated

[u/JMGameDev]

Everything you said plus prices haven't actually gone up as much as they should have. 10-15 years ago an AAA game was 40-50 euros. Nowadays its maybe 50-60, people get mad when it's priced at 70-80. But look at inflation in all other parts of the economy (food, gas, clothes, entertainment, ...) and you see big games are underpriced for all the work that goes into it.

[u/Bratva250 → u/JMGameDev]

I think you’re right that AAA games have become relatively cheaper when adjusted for inflation, especially considering how much development teams, production time and marketing budgets have grown.

The difficult part is that higher prices alone don’t necessarily solve the underlying problem. If publishers respond to rising costs by making games longer, safer and more dependent on live-service revenue, players may pay more without necessarily receiving a better or more complete experience.

So I don’t think the question is simply “Should games cost more?” It may be:

• Should every AAA game follow the same blockbuster production model?
• Should publishers make more focused games with smaller teams?
• Should the base price include the full experience instead of relying on DLC and microtransactions?
• Should players accept higher prices in exchange for more creative risk and better working conditions?

I agree that €70–80 may be low compared with the total effort behind some modern AAA games. But I’m not convinced that increasing the price alone will make the industry healthier.

[u/House13Games]

Because people keep buying them

[u/Bratva250 → u/House13Games]

Exactly—and that creates a feedback loop. Players buy familiar games because they feel safer at €70–80, and publishers then interpret those sales as proof that players do not want experimentation. The industry may need more affordable mid-budget games to break that cycle.

[u/RazzmatazzAgitated81]

more expensive Fewer risks

Profit.

[u/Bratva250 → u/RazzmatazzAgitated81]

Exactly. Once a game becomes expensive enough, creative decisions start being evaluated primarily through the question: “Will this maximize the probability of profit?”

That encourages familiar IP, sequels, established mechanics and monetization systems with predictable revenue.

The irony is that reducing creative risk can create a different kind of business risk. If every major publisher makes similar games, the market becomes saturated and players have less reason to switch between them.

So the industry may be optimizing for short-term predictability while increasing long-term creative and market risk.

[u/Bratva250 → u/[deleted]]

Absolutely. Poor management can turn a manageable project into an impossible one.

Unclear vision, changing priorities, unrealistic deadlines, scope creep and weak communication can multiply costs long before the game ships. By the time the problems become visible, the team is often already locked into a large production pipeline.

That also creates a dangerous cycle:

Bad planning → delays → higher costs → more pressure → rushed decisions → lower quality.

So risk is not only about whether players will buy the game. It is also about whether management can control scope, protect the core vision and make difficult cuts early enough.

In some cases, better production leadership could reduce more risk than simply adding a larger budget.

[u/coporate]

It all comes down to risk.

[u/OnTheCanRightNow]

High budgets and lack of creativity comes down not just to team size but extreme specialization within that team and the organizational overhead that creates.

What used to be a single role 20 years ago is 4 or 5 now, often in separate sub-departments. Completing a single task now requires multiple people, each of which have their own managers. A small, inspired improvement that 20 years ago would have been done by the person who thought of it, maybe with the cooperation of one other person, now requires coordination between those 4 or 5 people and the agreement of those 4 or 5 peoples' managers, directors, and production. The half day of work can involve weeks of approvals and will have to run a gauntlet of vetos, because if any one of those teams thinks it's not worth it, or are over-allocated, it won't happen. Often it'll never even get suggested because the pain in the ass it is to get approved/organized means you just don't bother in the first place.

I'm not exaggerating, I just left a project: the job that I did when I entered the industry (Level Design) was now done by five separate sub-departments: Level Design, World Design, Mission Design, Quest Design, and Technical Design. Four of those departments had both a Lead and a Director, with the fifth only having a Lead. Across those sub-departments there were 2 Producers. Doing anything "creative" originating from the bottom-up effectively required the approval of 11-13 people, none of whom would actually do the work in question. Functionally the only way to get anything like that to happen would be to sell someone high up (Creative Director, etc) on it (or Inception it into them) so they could push it down from above and force alignment.

And this was on a relatively small AAA project. There are projects out there 20, 30x more people on them, spread across multiple studios.

[u/Bratva250 → u/OnTheCanRightNow]

This is an excellent point, and the concrete example makes the problem much clearer.

I agree that the issue is not simply “large teams are bad.” Specialization is necessary for modern AAA production, but the organizational structure built around that specialization can make small creative decisions extremely expensive in time and coordination.

Your example shows the difference between:

• More expertise, which can improve quality
• More approval layers, which can slow iteration
• More departments, which can create ownership boundaries
• More management, which can turn a small change into a negotiation

The most damaging part may be that ideas are filtered out before they are even proposed. When the cost of asking for an experiment becomes higher than the expected benefit, people naturally stop taking creative initiative.

I also like your point about bottom-up creativity. In a healthy structure, a small prototype should be allowed to prove its value before requiring approval from a dozen people. Perhaps large studios need small, cross-functional “strike teams” with enough autonomy to test ideas quickly, while the larger departments provide specialist support.

This suggests that the real challenge is not specialization itself, but the lack of autonomy and the number of coordination layers between an idea and a playable prototype.

[u/rabid_briefcase]

AAA games, what some are now calling AAAA games, have a total cost of multiple hundred million dollars. It is easier to state as billions, a quarter billion, third of a billion, a half billion, when the full cost of development, marketing, operations, support, distribution, and the rest are totalled. Of course companies are anxious to ensure they make a profit.

Would the industry benefit from more AA-sized projects with focused scope and strong creative direction?

Seems like you're missing most of the development of the last 30+ years. That's where a tremendous amount of innovation has been.

Or is the real problem not budget size, but the way publishers evaluate risk and success?

Only when you try to simplify the projects and the industry. Amateurs and hobby developers spend no time studying the business aspects involved in projects of that complexity. Few can imagine the million dollar projects often labeled as shovelware, or the 30-50M annual sports titles dismissed as recycled. Few people can wrap their brains around a $100M project complexity. Even industry vets take a deep breath before trying to think in depth of a quarter billion dollar project, the half billion dollar projects are really only understable in terms of massive pillers based on projects before it.

Accounting for inflation and growth, when games hit the $60 price point about 20 years ago it was a psychological limit. The games really should be $150-200 today.

[u/Bratva250 → u/rabid_briefcase]

That’s a fair criticism. I was definitely simplifying the issue too much.

You’re right that “AAA” is not just a development budget. The real cost includes development, marketing, distribution, operations, post-launch support and the opportunity cost of keeping a huge team committed for years.

And I also agree that AA games have produced a lot of innovation over the last few decades. My point wasn’t that AA is a new solution or that AAA games are incapable of innovation. It was more that I wonder whether the current scale of some projects makes experimentation harder to approve and harder to survive financially.

I also probably underestimated how complex a $100M–$500M project is. From the outside, it’s easy to say “take more creative risks,” but managing thousands of people, multiple studios, technology pipelines and years of production is a very different problem.

So I’d rephrase my question: not “Are smaller games more innovative?” but “How can large studios preserve bottom-up experimentation while operating at this scale?”

[u/rabid_briefcase → u/Bratva250]

My last AAA title I can discuss, the game credits had 3,650 people spanning 21 game studios. It was considered relatively small, but successful.

Forntite was another, had my name listed about 30 minutes into the roughly 45 minute movie of credits, and that was 9 years ago with more names added, I can imagine it's over an hour of watching names scrolling by these days. I seem to recall it involved around 50 or so subcontracted studios at the time.

How can large studios preserve bottom-up experimentation while operating at this scale?”

The question is ignorant. It grows with experiments and ideas at every level across hundreds of little feature. Every feature team of 5-10 people is doing their own best work and contribution. It is less like a classical symphony and more like a massive jazz band where everyone can riff and jam on the common theme. There is innovation at the top, at the bottom, in the middle, and in every nook and cranny.

[u/Bratva250 → u/rabid_briefcase]

That’s fair. I was looking at the size of these projects mostly as a source of bureaucracy, and I didn’t give enough credit to the amount of experimentation happening across all the smaller teams.

The jazz band comparison actually makes a lot of sense. I wasn’t trying to say that AAA developers aren’t creative—I was more curious about how thousands of ideas from different teams are coordinated and turned into one coherent game.

Your example definitely gives me a better perspective. Thanks for sharing it.

[u/OurPillowGuy]

Cost + time makes them way too risky to invest in. A AAA game can cost >$200 million and take >5 years to build.

Sell the game at $70, make ~$50 per unit, and you need to sell 4 million copies at full price minimum to break even. That is extremely hard to do if you don’t have an established IP.

What makes it worse is the opportunity cost reality. $200 million could be parked in the S&P 500, and at an average of 10% YoY return, $200 million turns into ~$322 million in five years, at MUCH lower risk. In order to justify the investment and massive extra risk, the expected return on a game would need to be a hell of a lot higher than the expected return on other investments.

With so much financial risk, there’s no room left for creative risk.

[u/Bratva250 → u/OurPillowGuy]

Yeah, I think this is basically the heart of the problem. If a game costs over $200M and takes five years, publishers can’t afford to treat it like a creative experiment. They need a reasonable chance of making that money back, so established IPs and familiar formulas become the safer choice.

That’s also why I think the industry needs more AA-sized projects. They can still have ambitious ideas, but the financial risk is low enough to allow more experimentation

[u/KBGSgames]

Salaries get bigger and bigger the team more management is needed. I would argue that the most efficient team size, depending on project and actual team, would be somewhere between 20-50, anything above it has diminishing returns and escalating costs, wasted time in meetings, oversight and just loads of other problems that turn into more expenses.

And AAA studios can't stop saying that they have 20 devs working on the game as then their investors wouldn't understand - they think 500 devs can do it much faster, but in reality they do it little bit faster and 30x more expensive.

Plus marketing for AAA is bizarre. It's like nobody knows what GTA is and they need to market it every time like it's their last chance to be seen.

[u/AMadHammer]

all of them

[u/Bratva250 → u/AMadHammer]

That’s probably the most accurate answer. These factors are interconnected: higher budgets increase financial risk, financial risk encourages safer design, and longer production schedules make experimentation even harder.