It really is, these technologies should be streamlining game budgets, not bloating them. The budgets for cutscenes have gone up with mocap almost becoming industry standard and occasional celebrity voice actors, but not anywhere near enough to justify this.
Let's say a game takes 5 years to make. Now, most are closer to 2-3, but we're being generous. That means a $150mil budget game (for reference, Fallout 4 had approx 300Mil budget, but that includes advertising) has has $30M/anum.
HR is always the biggest cost in big business. Let's assume you pay everyone the same amount, commie company, from mocap to vis effect artist to boob physics playtester, $100,000/year (after ER-side taxes, health plans, etc). MOST occupations would be more than happy with a six figure salary, even in gamedev programming (quick google search, average wage is 91k for them).
You have a budget for 300 employees at this exorbitantly generous rate for your 5 year game cycle. But really, closer to 200, because you need a building, computers, program licenses, etc. 200 EEs: 10 writers (storyboard), 10 concept artists, 10 FX artists, 20 actors (mo-cap and/or voice), 10 foley artists, 40 actual programmers,
a director/manager/liason/supervisor for about every 10 of these so 10 total, 5 janitors, 5 security, 5 accountants (payroll/taxes/purchasing/sales/budget), 25 beta testers, 10 marketing/B2B people, ~5 lawyers on retainer for legal, ~15 international translaters, 15 generic internal communications or middle management types to coordinate all of this, and 5 leeches at the very top earning the real piles of money for "owning" the company.
OK, that's insane. So after they drop $1mil of a game budget on this where does the other $149 mill go??
It really is, these technologies should be streamlining game budgets, not bloating them. The budgets for cutscenes have gone up with mocap almost becoming industry standard and occasional celebrity voice actors, but not anywhere near enough to justify this.
And the product of those mocap and voice over expenditures? Cringe cutscenes that most gamers aggressively skip.
Let's say a game takes 5 years to make. Now, most are closer to 2-3, but we're being generous. That means a $150mil budget game (for reference, Fallout 4 had approx 300Mil budget, but that includes advertising) has has $30M/anum.
HR is always the biggest cost in big business. Let's assume you pay everyone the same amount, commie company, from mocap to vis effect artist to boob physics playtester, $100,000/year (after ER-side taxes, health plans, etc). MOST occupations would be more than happy with a six figure salary, even in gamedev programming (quick google search, average wage is 91k for them).
You have a budget for 300 employees at this exorbitantly generous rate for your 5 year game cycle. But really, closer to 200, because you need a building, computers, program licenses, etc. 200 EEs: 10 writers (storyboard), 10 concept artists, 10 FX artists, 20 actors (mo-cap and/or voice), 10 foley artists, 40 actual programmers,
a director/manager/liason/supervisor for about every 10 of these so 10 total, 5 janitors, 5 security, 5 accountants (payroll/taxes/purchasing/sales/budget), 25 beta testers, 10 marketing/B2B people, ~5 lawyers on retainer for legal, ~15 international translaters, 15 generic internal communications or middle management types to coordinate all of this, and 5 leeches at the very top earning the real piles of money for "owning" the company.