Video games -- particularly AAA video games -- have become too expensive to make. The intel from every fly on the wall in every investor's room is there is an increasing level of caution about spending hundreds of millions just to release a single video game. And you can't blame them. Many AAA game budgets mean that you can print hundreds of millions in revenue, and not even turn a profit. If you are an investor, quite frankly, there are many easier ways to make a buck.
Let's do some quick math to illustrate how much this headcount bloat can cost. According to Glassdoor the median salary at Bethesda Game Studios is $87,000. How precisely accurate this figure is, we can't know for sure, but it lines up with Glassdoor's more comprehensive average for the entire industry in the United States, which is $85,000 per year. On Starfield, there were 400 more employees to pay compared to Fallout 4.
Raising Game Prices Is Not the AnswerBallooning budgets and headcount is a problem that is weighing down the entire AAA industry. And unfortunately, it has recently led to significant industry-wide layoffs. As the industry wrestles with the problems and explores solutions, game prices keep coming up. To this end, game prices may look higher than ever, but the hobby actually used to be more expensive. Aka inflation is a heck of a deceiver. A $70 N64 game in 1998 is $134.13 in today's money.
Raising game prices will help increase your margins on the back end, but it doesn't address the actual problem, which is that you are spending too much to make your games. The last 10 years suggest it is also an exponential problem, not a flat increase that can be accounted for. In other words, not only is this problem not going anywhere, it is actually snowballing into a larger and larger issue over time.