At What Cost Do You Make A Game?

Have you ever wondered how much it would cost to make your own game, and then market it? While the answer would probably be around the cost of your firstborn’s soul, it’s actually a lot more than that. Let me break down some of the costs that you need to look into even after you’ve made and published your game online.

First, let me say that sometimes it can cost as little as absolutely nothing to make a game. After all, there are game engines that will allow you to make it free of charge. Programmes like Unreal Engine will only charge you if you earn over $1 million in annual gross revenue, so unless you hit it big, you won’t have to pay 5% royalties. But, let’s say you do have to pay after earning $1 million, that would be $50,000, which is… still a lot, especially if you’re an indie studio. Of course, this can be bypassed if you submit it on the Epic Games Store, where you don’t have to pay revenue.

However, there are other things you’ll need to pay for. Let’s say you’re publishing a game on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo Switch. To publish a game on Steam, you’ll need a Steamworks account, which requires a $100 app submission fee, which means you’ll need to supply both your tax and banking information. Overall, it’s not a lot. In fact, Steam will only take a 30% cut from any sales of your game on the platform, which overall, doesn’t make it a bad place to start. Even publishing on consoles surprisingly doesn’t cost any money to apply to their partners or development program. Nowadays, you can even get a PlayStation dev kit, and an Xbox one on loan, which makes it more accessible for indie developers to create games for their platforms. This has made it far more accessible for indie developers, as a PS4 dev kit, according to a general Google consensus, could cost $2500 back in the day, while an Xbox One would cost $500. The PlayStation dev kits were by far the most expensive, with a Switch dev kit also costing between $450-$500.

I should note here, that according to my research, it’s more of the dev kits themselves that cost the most when it comes to publishing on consoles. However, the PlayStation Partners Program will allow you the chance to let you track sales metrics with them, and select titles can have integrated campaigns. Of course, the biggest challenge for selling on PlayStation is amplifying your reach, so it’s good to know there is a chance to (probably pay) for digital advertising with them.

Publishing on Xbox will require you to pay a modest one-time cost for access to their Partner Center portal, but overall, they won’t charge you when it comes to submitting, publishing, or updating any of your games. Likewise, the Nintendo development portal will also not charge you for registering to their portal, nor will they charge you for downloading their needed tools, and it looks like they’ll only really charge you for purchasing dev kits.

By all accounts, once you’ve made your game, that’s when it’ll become more expensive. In the past year, the costs for conventions have been revealed, and Eurogamer did an interesting article about the costs of each trailer. They revealed that a single one-minute trailer would cost as much as $250,000, with two and a half minutes costing $550,000. This doesn’t even include the cost of attending Summer Games Fest itself. Admittedly, Gamescom in Germany isn’t that friendly to indie developers either. To show a minute-long or a minute-and-a-half-long trailer, it will cost €5000, or €7500 for an in-house cut. If you want an 180-second interview with your trailer? That’s €10,000, and €3000 for any product placement on the set itself. If you want premium product placement of your game? That’ll be €6000, and let’s not forget how much it will be if you submit your game for any of the Gamescom awards. One submission alone will be €440, and €800 if you apply for up to three, and an additional €200 on top of that if you want to apply for more. Of course, the good news is, if you’re exhibiting, that will be half-price.

Unfortunately, looking back, it doesn’t look like the price of exhibiting will be going down any time soon, as it was still expensive in 2017. In this article, you’ll see how much it costs just to exhibit at a convention. They consider the price of different booths, the gear you’ll need, promotional materials, furniture in the booth, shipping costs, the building cost of each booth, accommodation, travel, and overall costs of hiring staff to work the booths. The cheapest you could pay for a three-day con, as they figured out, would be $2240. The middle-ground would be $8695, and if you wanted to go all out? You’d be looking at $45,131. Keep in mind, that these were just the prices from 2017, and these have no doubt changed due to inflation.

But as you can see, making and marketing a game is pretty damn expensive, and the conventions don’t make it easy for indie developers to promote their games, especially if you consider that some devs just won’t have the money to spend so much on marketing.