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The story
Reports that Insomniac Games’ upcoming Wolverine title has a development budget of roughly $300 million (about ¥46.5 billion) set off a firestorm on 5ch’s hardware board (Gehan). Posters expressed shock at a budget on par with the Avengers movie franchise, with some pointing to soaring labor costs and lengthy development cycles as the culprits. Others zeroed in on the game’s underwhelming graphics and scores, questioning where all that money could possibly have gone — and opinion split sharply on whether the game can ever earn it back.
What people said
A: Blame Nintendo.
Wages have shot up with inflation, and if there's a lot of overtime it could easily double from there.
On top of that, equipment costs, licensing fees, and who knows what else have probably gone up too.
Insomniac's pay scale:
$10,000 comes out to about ¥1.54M at current rates, so $100,000 is roughly ¥15.4M.
Programmers (Engineers)
Regular: $100K–$160K
Senior: $120K–$190K
Game Designers
Regular: $95K–$155K
Lead/Senior: $130K–$200K+
Artists/Animators
Regular: $85K–$140K
Senior: $130K–$200K
Intern/Associate (junior): $69K–$126K
One thing's for sure — the dev cycle was way too long.
Probably went into upgrading the arm-hair quality.
That's labor costs for you. Say this Wolverine game could get finished in one year with 100 staff, all working overtime every single day including weekends. Now say instead they threw 300 staff at it, everyone clocking out on time every day, and it took two years to finish — the labor cost balloons to six times as much. That's just what gets called "AAA."
Sounds like there was a lot of back-and-forth, so they probably rebuilt it several times over.
Same, I'll buy it too. Persona 5 Royal blowing past 100 hours was genuinely pointless.
It's a pretty straight linear path though, you sure you're okay with that?
https://imgur.com/a/zTjtxDB
If people could cancel their preorders, a lot probably would. Future releases are only going to sell worse from here.
In that case it should outsell FE — Wolverine had a $300M budget on top of PlayStation's 100-million-unit install base after all.
Avengers: Age of Ultron — $365,000,000
Avengers: Endgame — $356,000,000
Avengers: Infinity War — $325,000,000
That's insane. What are PlayStation fanboys supposed to do with this?
This… is genuinely bad.
Going by the reviews saying it's linear, has zero variety, and is over fast despite all that money — a lot of what's actually on screen looks like it was slapped together fairly recently.
Did you know? When you work at a company, just sitting around waiting on another department still gets you paid, as long as it's during work hours. And if the employer isn't shady, you get proper overtime pay too if that waiting pushes you into overtime.
Even Deadpool couldn't save it on fighting spirit alone…
If project management and scheduling go wrong, you end up with a lot of people just sitting idle, and that racks up extra cost regardless of quality. They probably spent that idle time upgrading the arm-hair rendering. So maybe a huge chunk of the budget went straight into the arm hair.
Background and key points of this discussion
Wolverine is Insomniac Games’ upcoming title, also known for having suffered a data leak in the past. The reported $300 million figure appears to reflect industry-wide trends of rising labor costs and growing development scale, and posters in the thread pointed to engineer and designer salary levels to argue that a longer development cycle can double labor costs. That said, it remains unclear whether the announced $300 million represents pure development costs or also includes marketing and licensing fees. The figure is often compared to the budgets of Avengers films (around $350 million), but since movies and games differ in licensing arrangements and multi-platform release strategies, such a direct comparison should be treated with caution.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Gehan”) thread “Wolverine’s Dev Budget Is $300 Million (About ¥46.5 Billion) — What Are They Going to Do About This.”
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