Schreier: AAA game budgets in North America amount to $300 million "and even more"

About a year ago, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier laid out why modern blockbusters can run into the hundreds of millions. Since then, his information indicates those figures kept climbing — AAA budgets are being talked about at the $300M mark.

Schreier cautioned that company finances are often opaque, so exact budgets are hard to verify; still, he keeps hearing talk of production costs “at $300 million and even more.” That line stuck with him (and with whoever’s been listening).

“I think this fact can explain the current state of the industry,” he noted — a blunt take that hints at why things feel so tense right now.

Post‑pandemic, most firms — tiny indies and big publishers alike — have tried to trim whatever they can (layoffs, restructure, etc.). You’ve probably seen the headlines about studio cuts; they’re symptoms, not the whole story.

Don’t assume every studio has those war‑chest numbers. The chatter Schreier cites is focused on studios in the U.S./CAN; if a AAA title you follow had a far smaller tab, it was likely made elsewhere or under very different conditions.

Schreier also says the budget is dominated by devs’ pay — salaries make up the lion’s share (management bonuses usually land in stock, not the cash line items).

Putting it into plain math: a $300M price tag forces a brutal break‑even point, and publishers still pour money into marketing. Schreier put the numbers like this:

If you sell a game for $70 and receive $49 from each sale (30% goes to the store, assuming all sales are digital), you need to sell more than 6 million copies just to break even on a $300 million budget, and that’s not even counting marketing.

That kind of scale turns every new AAA franchise — say, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet — into a high‑stakes bet. Some houses (e.g., Naughty Dog) have platform holders behind them who can absorb misses; most teams don’t enjoy that cushion.

As for speeding things up or cutting costs, Schreier isn’t sold on AI as a silver bullet. Studios experiment w/ various AI tools, but any gains so far are marginal — not the game‑changing shortcut some hoped for.