Why does a game company need billions of dollars to develop a game?

Some people may think, hundreds of millions? Is this number too scary? For those laymen who are not familiar with the situation, it is indeed somewhat unbelievable. How could such a huge investment be needed even though I was just playing games?

But in reality, game development is like burning money, which includes huge labor costs and high art production costs. Taking the mobile game "Against the Cold Water" as an example, the studio used 412 team members to develop it over a period of 3 years, with a labor cost of up to 640 million yuan. In addition, there are also significant expenses such as venue rent and art outsourcing.

Open world games such as Genshin Impact have high requirements for art quality, so a large-scale art studio needs to be established to produce game content from the main producer. This requires a huge art budget. Mihayou said that since the launch of Genshin Impact, the annual cost for game maintenance has reached 200 million dollars.

Other major works, such as GT5, Cyberpunk 2077, and Wilderness Escort, have R&D costs exceeding billions of RMB. It can be seen that developing a high-quality game requires funds beyond the imagination of outsiders.

As an outsider in the gaming industry, it may be difficult to directly understand the vast and complex production system hidden behind game companies while standing at the door and peering in.