There haven’t been many video games throughout history whose creation has cost more than 100 million dollars. According to Wikipedia, only 17 titles including ‘Spider-Man 2‘, ‘The Last of Us 2’ or ‘Destiny’. But Sony has already believed that AAA games cannot cost less than that amount. One hundred million is the average budget. From there, we can talk about the word “blockbuster”. Do you know the bubble we are experiencing in the film world this year? Well, there are some things coming.
One hundred million, where will they go?
In other words: Sony needs to sell one and a half million units at $70 each of this budget video game just to break even. And, hopefully, make some kind of profit. And as much as some insist, no: selling one and a half million video games outside of sales is by no means the norm.
In fact, currently only three titles have surpassed this barrier: ‘Spider-Man 2’ (5 million), ‘Elden Ring’ (3.64 million) and ‘Final Fantasy XVI’ (3 million), with an honorable mention to ‘Demon’s Souls’ that almost reaches one and a half million. If the long-term strategy is to create expensive AAA games to promote and consider games like ‘Lords of the Fallen’ practically indies, things are not going well.
And yet, according to leaked documents from Insomniac, we know that ‘Wolverine’ already intends to spend 305 million dollars and ‘Spider-Man 3’ 385, only surpassed by the two versions of ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ and, of course, the always anticipated and never fully released ‘Star Citizen’. Is this really what we want for the future of the industry? Frankly, we should think twice about it.
