This Post Will Not Meet Sales Expectations

The Numbers

It is May 15, 2024 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth did not meet sales expectations.

It is September 18th, 2024 and Final Fantasy XVI did not meet sales expectations.

It is August 21st and Capcom has announced that Monster Hunter Wilds did not meet sales expectations.

It is February 2nd, 2026, and SEGA has announced that Sonic Racing CrossWorlds did not meet sales expectations.

It is February 3rd, 2026, and Obsidian has announced that both Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 did not meet sales expectations.

The budget of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is over 100 million dollars.

The budget of Final Fantasy 16 was nearly 60 million dollars.

The budget of Monster Hunter Wilds is unknown but Wilds was one of the highest selling AAA games of that year, selling 10 millions copies in just its first month but slowed down afterwards.

The budget of Sonic Racing CrossWorlds is also unknown, but was critically praised and sold over 1 million units.

Avowed is said to have a budget of around 100 million but this is based on user estimations and it could be more or less. Outer Worlds 2 on the other hand is also unknown as far as its budget is concerned, but both games sold over 10 million to date.

The first commonality you may notice is that it's very hard to find the budgets for modern triple AAA games. I had to look up multiple different sites just to find rough approximations in many of those cases. And even then I'm not completely sure of the budget that these games had. The gaming industry, especially as it stands relatively to other industries (such as film) is known as a "black box", or something where both the inputs and outputs tend to be mysterious.

This may be for a variety of internal reasons, but speaking frankly, it's probably just so the people behind it don't look like dumbasses for investing millions of dollars on something that didn't even make half its budget back. Or, as someone mentioned to me on Discord, that an indie game that took 1/100th of it to make, is just as good, if not better, same (although to a lesser extent) for double AA game.

The second most common overlap between all of these games have ridiculous budgets, for contrast one of the smallest GDP in the world as of 2025, located in Tuvalu is $58 million, that means you could fit at least two Polynesian Island economies into the budget of, for example, Rebirth.

It's absolutely insane.

The third, and last theme that is consistent, is perhaps a more subtle one unless you read the articles I linked but the kicker is that these companies do not always tell you what those expectations were to begin with. That, obviously, makes it very hard to know for sure whether those projections were fair to the team in the first place or if they made any financial sense given the economy, global context, etc.

Quite honestly, this has been one of my biggest pet peeves in gaming for a while now. What are these projections based on? Who is making them and why? How do games keep falling short of corporate expectations?

I should note, in the pursuit of fairness, that Rebirth was a timed PS5 exclusive and this undoubtedly hurt its sales. Its predecessor, Remake, was also released on multiple consoles during COVID, so you know, we didn't really have a choice there.

Now look, I know I'm not the first person to point out the ridiculous budgets of huge games. Here's just some I found by searching for all of a minute:

1. Yes, video game budgets are skyrocketing, but the reason goes beyond graphics
2. You Won’t Believe How Much More Expensive Games Are to Make Compared to 15 Years Ago
3. Massive Video Game Budgets: The Existential Threat Some Saw A Decade Ago
4. What’s behind ballooning video game budgets?
5. Game budgets have gone out of control – let's shrink the scope
6. The Crisis Of Massive Budgets In Gaming Is Still A Very Current Issue

I also found an article from 2015 and 2016, respectively, that called out the same thing. So yeah, I'm not breaking new ground here by pointing out that these corporations are spending massive amounts of money. This has been a known issue and even for games from relatively smaller double AA studios such as Larian, Deck Nine, Hazelight, Ninja Theory, Sandfall Interactive, the budget can be huge.

For example, Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive) was made for less than 10 million and this is considered small these days for a video game. It was lauded for many of its visuals, writing, turn-based combat (while criticized for AI use during production) and was able to get much praise, including my own, on 1/10th the budget of Rebirth.

But another way to look at that number is that in my current yearly income it would take me 500 years to reach 10 million dollars, I would need to live (on average) 6.5 times over to make that and spend every year of my life working, until I died.

And this is a small budget!

I'm not here to conjecture about what has led to this. You can read one of the many links I posted above and decide for yourself. The leading culprits however (to save you time) seem to be: employee costs, graphics, marketing/PR, longer development cycles and last but certainly not least, mismanagement.

The Sources

Instead of conjecturing, let's go straight to the source(s).

According to block-happy journalist Jason Schreier:

Budgets for games are now enormous because those two vectors — more people, more time — have grown so significantly over the last decade. ... And, perhaps most alarmingly, games are growing more expensive because of rampant mismanagement — because of companies chasing trends, making bad bets and lacking a clear creative vision. Inefficient workflows, technological shifts and insecure executives can all be the cause of wasted time, which equates to higher budgets.

Sure, employees cost a lot, it takes way longer to make games than it used to (though it doesn't have to), and graphics are much more resource-intensive than they used to be, but management bears responsibility for a huge part in the costs too.

In this article Schreier highlights how game developers can be paid a lot to do very little because their managers are busy taking a day off, got a brand new idea for the game from another they just played, or a game gets delayed or even shelved because the trend they were chasing is suddenly out of touch.

Now, this may not sound like the worst thing in the world. Hell, the phrase, "people get to be paid a lot to work a little" would sound like heaven for most, myself included! But as Schreier notes, this all sounds lovely until crunch happens and there's no room for errors. Suddenly all of that time you spent sitting around drinking mountain dew and eating Doritos (as I presume all game developers do!) is suddenly spent white-knuckling the weekends, knocking back your fifth red bull and wishing the sweet sweet release of death upon you ASAP.

And if you want to really have your eyes water from development costs Tech Spot writer Skye Jacobs back in 2025 wrote:

Recent revelations from an Activision executive's deposition in a lawsuit shed further light on the staggering costs of modern game development. Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015) cost $450 million to develop, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) cost $640 million, and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) cost $700 million. With over 3,000 people working on the Call of Duty franchise, labor costs are undeniably substantial.

Now, I'm not going to hide my biases here. The last CoD game I played was back when Halo 3 online was popular, so not particularly recently unfortunately for my hairline. Regardless, I am no fan of the yearly release schedule, the way Activision tends to treat their employees (also see here, here, and here for a more positive story from 2025), and in general, I just dislike modern AAA FPS.

I don't like the online culture of competition, how players talk to each other, how "gud" you have to be just to get anywhere in competitive play, and in general I'd rather play wacky single-play FPS games like I Am Your Beast, Mullet Madjack, Captain Wayne: Desperation Vacation. And hell, I'm not scared of playing AAA games like the DOOM trilogy, Metroid Prime Remastered, Titan Fall 2, you get it.

But the Call of Duty franchise isn't interested in being a game it's interested in being an experience that constantly gets money out of you though microtransactions, skins, custom guns, emotes, camos, whatever.

And these microtransactions are also part of why budgets grow rapidly over time because when you are trying to put in all of these extra features it makes the development cycle more complicated and even longer. That's because you're also trying to keep a games infrastructure going over a longer period of time, there's "always online", (more here) and teams of people constantly working (and therefore getting paid!) to make sure the games stay current and engaging.

It's infinite growth for the sake of it. Which, to be fair, is pretty much the MO of capitalism writ large. I'm not surprised by it, I just want capitalism to be a lot less a part of the gaming industry and vice versa. Well, to be honest I want capitalism to be less involved in everything, but hey, for now, we'll have to make things better.

Well, I say "for the sake of it" but the "it" here is profit. Now, I'm not inherently against profit, I think it's great for folks to make money (except for the billionaires and millionaires, you don't get there without exploitation).

Back to gaming though, all of this begs a question: If all of these games did not meet their sales expectations, what does it take for them to break even?

Rhys Elliot, writing for Midia Research says,

Games need to sell 10 million copies to simply break even in some cases, and the opportunity cost of making a game for six-plus years is enormous.

So again, that's 500 years of my current salary, just to break even.

There's a reason why these games fall below sales expectations! These numbers are unsustainable and it's unreasonable to think, for example, the most recent Prince of Persia game Lost Crown, would have made an estimated 3 million in a year when it took Metroid: Dread (you know, the namesake of Metroidvania games) 3 years to make that much! For the record, Lost Crown made over 1 million years in its first year and that's awesome for a struggling franchise, Prince of Persia had not gotten an entry prior to Lost Crown for 10 years!

Yet Ubisoft decided to not only say the sales were struggling but then shuttered the development team. This was a game that I did not play because it's not my genre, but as the BBC notes it was in the top 50 games of Metacritic, well received, as noted it sold over a million units. Yet not only was this unacceptable to Ubisoft but it was so bad that the talented developers at Ubisoft Montpellier got fired.

The saddest part of this article is that this piece notes that a remake for the 2003 Sands of Time game is expected to be remade soon. It's worth noting this article was written in 2024, before the very recent restructuring at Ubisoft that cancelled the remake as well as several other unnamed games and projects.

So this leads me to the final point of this section, what do these excessive and unreasonable sales expectations lead to? They seem to only lead to layoffs, delays, cancelled games, have I mentioned layoffs? In short: All of these ridiculous sales expectations don't even bring the industry as a whole to a better place, it seems to only aid the industry in getting to a much worse place.

A place where CEOs and the shareholders are taking way more than the employees are, a 100 million game somehow "only" requires 6 million to break even, there's crunch everywhere to make up for mismanagement, and the worst part is that all of this is a choice. We can have a better gaming industry, but that just doesn't work for those at the top, unfortunately.

So what can we do?

The Means

I know a lot of this post has been criticism, so I want to put forth some positive things that are going on in the gaming industry as well. I also know I've used a lot of in-text citations (which you can skip, to be clear, but they're there for sources) so I'm going to do my best to keep this last part in my own words as much as I can.

Concretely speaking, each of us has a very limited amount of time in a given day, and anyone reading this probably isn't a millionaire much less a thousandaire (although if you are...hit me up?!) but there's still things we can do. I'll always firmly believe that although the world can be a beautiful place, it can also be a horrible one, and often humanity is the difference in that equation.

I've noted before about unionization in the gaming industry and that's one of the biggest things I champion as a way to make things a bit better (at least) for the employees who are going through it. If unions are, for example, able to get concessions from Activision-Blizzard then they have the power to get compromises from just about any gaming company.

Whether that means a "no crunch" policy implemented (and actually enforced!), better wages, better benefits, no mandatory overtime, more transparency, all of these issues and more can be addressed.

But as gamers our power is a bit more limited. Of course we can call for boycotts, we can speak up on social media about outrageous budgets, we can write lengthy essays about how pissed off we are at a single issue and how it affects everything else, just as a random example. All of this is very individualized however.

Boycotts can, of course, be more collective. Though even then they can be for ridiculous reasons or not resonate with the larger gaming audience. A good recent example, would be Ghost of Yotei. Where people tried to boycott it online because it was "woke", but that didn't really work.

At the same time, lots of people openly derided Concord and didn't want to play it. I'm not sure if I'd call it an out and out boycott, but anyone who knows anything about how that game did knows it didn't go very well. And a large part of that was because gamers rejected it for not being free to play, looking generic, and generally not being an appealing product.

Again, I'd hesitate it to call it a boycott, there seems to me to be a difference between an explicit and intentional boycott vs "I'm not buying that, looks like it sucks" and then just having millions of others happening to think the same way.

But whatever the case, the gamers spoke on that matter and it ended up getting more "always online" styled games that are free to play or based around microtransactions, etc. cancelled from Sony (check that cancelled link I posted earlier which talks about this in more detail).

Another tactic, is instead of withholding money from games you don't want to play, you give your hard-earned money to the games you do want to. 2025 was a great example of that. Some folks called it the year of the indies because of how much double AA games and independent games took off and stole the show.

Examples include Hollow Knight Silksong, Expedition 33, Blue Prince, Schedule 1, Hades II, Ball x Pit, PEAK, and way more than I could ever list here. Many of the titles I just mentioned were either nominated at the Game Awards or even won, especially Expedition 33 which won a ton of awards, the most ever.

2025 seemed like a clear statement, at least to me, against triple-AAA games and how bloated the budgets are, how unnecessarily demanding they can be, the lack of originality (at least in some of them). Time will tell if this particular tactic will pay off in 2026 and beyond, but I'm hopeful that something will give.

Another avenue people are trying to change the gaming industry is in the course. And while this isn't an avenue that is accessible to everyone, for those that can spare the money and resources to take on gaming giants such as Rockstar, there's huge publicity and good PR to be gotten from it, if nothing else.

One last way is by staying informed ourselves, supporting independent gaming media outlets that still report on these issues honestly and accurately. Good examples of this would be Rogue, Post Games, People Make Games, Aftermath, and I'm sure there are more to subscribe to besides just those.

Ultimately, our power is limited but we still have great tools at our disposal. Gaming companies rely on our wallets and while the individual consumer won't be able to change much except maybe ease their conscience, there is power is community and collective action against the powerful, there always has been.