How Much Does It Cost to Make a Video Game? (2026)

A commercial video game costs anywhere from $5,000 (a solo indie shipping on savings) to $700 million (Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s lifecycle budget, per a sworn Activision court declaration). Indie games run $5K-$500K, AA titles $1M-$50M, and modern AAA starts around $100M and climbs past $300M once marketing is included.

Those ranges hide a provenance problem: most budget numbers you see online are guesses repeated until they look like facts. This guide sticks to documented figures — financial disclosures, court filings, the 2023 Insomniac leak, and named journalist estimates — and labels which is which. If you are budgeting your own indie project, the tier that matters to you gets a full breakdown in our indie game development costs guide; this post covers the whole spectrum so you can see where your project actually sits.

The industry sorts projects into three loose tiers. The boundaries are fuzzy and self-assigned, but the cost bands are real:

Two things to notice before we go tier by tier. First, each step up is a jump of ten times or more, not a smooth slope. Second, the biggest single driver at every tier is the same: people multiplied by time. A game’s budget is mostly payroll, which is why a 20-person team taking three years costs a predictable amount almost regardless of genre.

This is the tier that actually applies to most people typing “how much does it cost to make a game” into Google, and it has the worst data, because indies rarely publish budgets and the ones who do are unusually successful.

The honest picture looks like this:

• —Solo developers typically spend $5K-$50K in cash (software, art or music contractors, Steam’s $100 fee, a capsule artist, maybe a trailer editor) plus one to four years of unpaid labor. The unpaid labor is the real budget. A solo dev who spends two years on a game and could have earned $70K a year elsewhere made a $140K investment, whatever their bank statement says.
• —Small teams of 2-5 land between $50K and $250K, usually a mix of savings, part-time contract work, and occasionally a small publisher advance.
• —Funded indie teams (publisher deal, grant money, or a prior hit) reach $250K-$500K and start to overlap with AA.

The documented examples are worth studying precisely because they are documented. Team Cherry raised about AU$57,000 on Kickstarter for Hollow Knight in 2014, then stretched it with personal savings and South Australian government support across three years of development. Stardew Valley’s cash budget was close to zero — Eric Barone lived cheaply and worked a part-time job for four and a half years. We walk through a dozen of these line by line in our famous indie game development budgets post, including which figures the developers stated themselves and which are back-calculated.

There is no reliable “average indie game budget” because the population is unknowable. What is knowable: more than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025, most of them indie, and most earned less than their developers’ unpaid labor was worth. Before you anchor on any budget number, read how much indie game developers actually make — the revenue side of this math is less forgiving than the cost side.

AA is the tier of mid-size studios: 20-100 people, a few years, real salaries. It produced some of the best value-for-money games of the last decade, and it has one genuinely well-documented example.

Ninja Theory built Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017) with roughly 20 developers for under $10 million, and said so publicly throughout development. They branded it an “independent AAA game” and published dev diaries on the cost-saving choices, like shooting motion capture in their own boardroom instead of renting a stage. It turned profitable within three months on about 500,000 units.

That $10M figure is the useful AA anchor. Scale it up or down with headcount:

Those rows use a fully loaded cost of $100K-$180K per person per year (salary plus benefits, equipment, office, and overhead), which is realistic for US and Western European studios. Studios in Poland, Ukraine, or Southeast Asia run 30-60% cheaper per head, which is how some “AA-priced” games look AAA on screen.

Very few AA budgets are disclosed. When you see a figure for a mid-size game, it is almost always an estimate built from headcount and timeline, the same math as the table above, done by a journalist or analyst. That method is legitimate, but it is an estimate, and this post flags it as one wherever it appears.

AAA budgets used to be secret. Between 2015 and 2025 they got pried open anyway: CD Projekt talks to investors, Sony’s figures escaped through the FTC v. Microsoft case and the December 2023 Insomniac hack, and Activision put Call of Duty numbers in a sworn court declaration. Here is what those sources actually document:

The provenance on each of those bars:

• —The Witcher 3: $81M, disclosed. CD Projekt’s CEO stated the game cost 306 million zloty (about $81M) to develop and market over three and a half years with a core team of 240. It is the cheapest documented modern AAA game, and Polish salary costs are a big part of why.
• —Cyberpunk 2077: roughly $316M through launch, disclosed. CD Projekt’s investor reporting put development plus marketing at about $316M by the December 2020 release. The company later disclosed another $125M spent on post-launch fixes through October 2023, plus roughly $85M on the Phantom Liberty expansion. Total franchise spend is north of $500M, all from official filings.
• —The Last of Us Part II ($220M) and Horizon Forbidden West ($212M): court filing. These surfaced in a poorly redacted Sony filing in the FTC v. Microsoft case in June 2023. Development only, no marketing.
• —Spider-Man 2: $315M, leaked, not disclosed. This comes from internal Sony documents published in the December 2023 Insomniac hack. Sony never confirmed it, but it is an internal figure, not an outside guess. The same documents budgeted $385M for Spider-Man 3.
• —Call of Duty: $450M-$700M per title, sworn court filing. Activision executive Patrick Kelly stated lifecycle budgets in a California court declaration reported by Game File: over $450M for Black Ops III (2015), over $640M for Modern Warfare (2019), and about $700M for Black Ops Cold War (2020). “Lifecycle” means years of post-launch content and live operations on top of the launch build, which is why these are the biggest documented numbers in gaming.
• —GTA V: roughly $265M, journalist estimate. This figure traces to 2013 reporting in The Scotsman covering development plus marketing; Rockstar has never published a budget (background on the estimate). It is probably the most-repeated game budget on the internet and it was never official.
• —GTA VI: no documented figure exists. The “$1-2 billion” numbers circulating in 2025-2026 are extrapolations from Take-Two’s aggregate development spending, not a disclosed budget. Treat them as rumor.

The pattern across everything documented: development is roughly half the bill. Marketing a AAA game costs about as much as making it, and live-service titles keep spending for years after launch.

Strip out the tier labels and every game budget reduces to the same formula: team size x months x fully loaded monthly cost per person, plus 10-30% on top for everything else.

Payroll is typically 70-80% of a game budget. The rest:

• —Marketing: 5-15% for indies who handle it themselves (see our indie game marketing budget guide), up to 100% of the dev budget at AAA scale.
• —Middleware and tools: engine royalties, audio licensing, dev kits. Unity and Unreal are effectively free until you earn real revenue, which flattened this line for indies.
• —Outsourced content: art, localization, QA, porting. The Witcher 3 shipped 15 language versions, seven fully dubbed, and CD Projekt called localization out as a major budget line.
• —Platform costs: Steam’s $100 app fee is trivial; the 30% revenue cut on the other end is not (the full split is in our Steam revenue share explainer).

Run the formula for your own project. A 3-person team, 24 months, at a lean $6K per person per month is $432K — and that is with everyone underpaid. This is why “how much does a game cost” is mostly a question about how long your game takes to make. Cut six months of scope and you cut the budget more reliably than any other decision you can make.

Budget figures come in five grades of trustworthiness. When you see a number, place it on this ladder before repeating it:

Grades 1-3 are worth citing. Grade 4 is usable with the caveat attached. Grade 5 is content-farm residue, and a lot of “top 10 most expensive games” lists are built entirely from it — including, notoriously, a $500M Destiny figure from 2013 that mostly described publishing and marketing commitments, not development.

Also check what a number includes. The three questions that change a figure by 2-3x: does it include marketing, does it include post-launch content, and is it a launch budget or a lifecycle total. Black Ops Cold War’s $700M and The Witcher 3’s $81M are not directly comparable; one is a multi-year lifecycle figure, the other stops at launch.

If you got this far because you are planning a project rather than settling a Reddit argument, here is the working checklist:

1. 01Price your time. Multiply your team size by months by a real monthly cost, even if nobody is drawing salary yet. That number is your actual budget, and it is what a publisher will mentally calculate when you weigh a publisher deal against self-publishing.
2. 02Work out your break-even in copies, not dollars. At a $15 price, after Steam’s 30% cut, regional pricing, refunds, and VAT, expect roughly $9-10 net per unit — run your exact numbers through the Steam fee calculator. A $50K budget means selling about 5,000-5,500 copies just to break even.
3. 03Compare that break-even to the market. Check average Steam game sales for your genre before believing your own projections, then model scenarios in the revenue calculator.
4. 04Reserve 10-15% for marketing from day one. A finished game with zero marketing budget is the most common shape of failure at the indie tier.
5. 05Read the deep dives for your tier. For indie-scale line items, budgets by team size, and what to pay contractors, start with indie game development costs and the documented famous indie budgets.

The cost of making a game is the easy half of the spreadsheet. Whether the store page can sell enough copies to cover it is the hard half — and that part you can test for free by running your page through the Steam Page Analyzer before you spend another month of payroll.