Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of the top-rated games of the year and has sold over 3.3 million copies. And it did it all with a very small budget, according to publisher Kelpler Interactive. How small? Portfolio director Matthew Handrahan isn’t saying, but he thinks everyone’s guesses are probably wrong.
“Everybody’s desperate to know what the budget is, and I won’t tell them, but I would guarantee if you got 10 people to guess, I think all 10 wouldn’t guess the actual figure,” he told GamesIndustry.biz. “I’m sure Mirror’s Edge and Vanquish cost more, put it that way.” Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 producer François Meurisse at Sandfall Interactive agreed. “I would say that I’ve seen a lot of budget estimations that are all higher than the real budget,” he said.
Mirror’s Edge and Vanquish are both awkward examples. While they fit the risk-taking, creative vibe of Expedition 33, they came out over a decade ago for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation of consoles. Official development budgets haven’t been released for either, but M2 Research ballparked the cost of making a triple-A game for those consoles at $18 to $28 million back in 2010.
If an accurate gauge of Expedition 33’s costs, which included a core team of around 30 people over four years plus publisher support from Kepler and outsourcing contracts abroad, that would still out of well below the budget’s typically bandied about for games in the “triple-I” space—big productions from smaller studios.
Whatever the actual number Handrahan’s alluding to is, his argument is that game budgets need to be reined in at many of the bigger studios, and publishers need a greater appreciation for what can be achieved with less. “I think that there’s been a lot of irresponsible practices in the industry,” he said. “Some games can make it work. Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to make it work, I think we can all say with great confidence. But there are plenty of games made with very large teams and for huge amounts of money that don’t land, and there is a human cost to running things that way. People lose their jobs.”
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