Making games isn’t cheap- pretty common knowledge by this point, right? Well, it can be cheap, depending on how large and ambitious your project is (or isn’t), but if it is large and ambitious, like Bethesda’s upcoming sci-fi RPG Starfield is going to be, development can cost a lot.
Bethesda’s Pete Hines was recently asked in an interview with Yahoo whether development costs on games would continue to go up as they have been doing over the years, and Hines’ answer was- it really depends on what kind of game we’re speaking of. A massive AAA game like Starfield? In that case, probably, yes.
“Games now are so diverse that to say the cost of all games are going up is a little too broad,” said Hines. “To make big triple A games like Starfield is not cheap. It never was. The team sizes are certainly bigger. Hell, back on Morrowind that team was 35 people. That’s not even close to the size on Fallout 76. But then you have a game like Legends which has a significantly smaller team than a lot of these other things. So it depends on what the game is and the size and the scope of it.”
The scope of Starfield definitely seems to be massive. Though it has been in development since 2015, Bethesda has made it clear that it’s going to be while yet before we hear from them about the game again. Hell, it’s probably not even launching on current gen consoles– though that hasn’t been ruled out completely. Either way, whatever it is, it’s going to be special- or at least, according to report, that’s what Bethesda says.