How do PVP games with such little content, asset wise, have such high budget costs? I assume they-- or at least hope that they do a lot more refining of things like the layout of the map than single player games but I just can't see how it works out to justify the cost.
Monstrous corporate waste and useless headcount. I can't find the meme-quality graphic at the moment, but at practically all the AAA companies, for every dollar they spend on actually producing the game (paying a developer's wages, buying hard disks for storage, building servers to compile test and release builds, etc.), they piss away another $10 on utterly useless faggots who add nothing of value to the product -- lawyers, personal assistants, secretaries, HR goons, DEI hires of all sorts, middle and upper management, "community managers," non-PR-department PR (meaning -- they pay an actual marketing department, but then they still let dipshits
outside that department engage in "marketing" of their own, including the now-classic tendency for non-PR people to openly insult and pick fights with the target audience), and all sorts of other useless bullshit.
I contracted at EA for about a year on two different projects (one withered on the vine after EA bought it from its original "indie developer" and the other met with modest success), and it astonished me how little money they actually spent on game development. That's stuck with me ever since and it's one of the first things I pay attention to when being interviewed (and given "the tour") by a prospective employer -- do they spend more time blowing smoke up my ass about free unlimited milk & cereal in the kitchen (EA did this), on-premises amenities and other uninteresting shit I can do better at home, or did they take me (a fucking engineer) straight to the raised floor to show me the cool blinkenlights on all the servers? Give 'ya one guess which one I preferred.
Hint: I never saw a server room at EA, despite the building obviously having one, my obvious qualifications to at least get a tour (I worked closely with their devops team prior to launch on a few things, including making the game lobby functional vs. "not working at scale until they asked if I had any ideas two weeks before launch"), and my occasional hints that it'd be fun to see on a lunch break sometime. I did, however, see the gym, the free arcade machines in the break rooms, the "wall of free cereal dispensers" in each kitchen, the wet bar, the
very fancy executive boardroom we lowly peons were never permitted to enter (we held
our meetings in more traditional "nondescript square rooms with a boring table in the center" and the local executive would "grace" us with his company once a month to be bored at us during status updates), and other utterly useless shit that meant nothing to anybody actually engaged in value-producing labor at the office.
You know how people bitch about military and government overspending? Like mythical $10k toilets and other stupid shit? lol ... fuckin' public sector's got
nothing on the sheer waste that goes on in private enterprise. I laugh (openly, out loud, even at inappropriate times) when I hear somebody bitch about some "super-overpriced" public sector related thing. "Dude, I worked at a huge game studio that gave everybody unlimited Special K every morning and handed out movie tickets like candy. STFU about 'government waste.'"