How much does it cost to make a game? // List of game development costs

If you haven’t made your first game yet, you might be wondering, how much does it cost to make a game and what do you need to pay for to make games? In this video I will go through how much my first game, Mortal Glory, cost to make and I will list all the common game development costs.

⚔️ Mortal Glory 2: https://store.steampowered.com/app/22...
⚔️ Chambers of Devious Design: https://store.steampowered.com/app/16...
⚔️ Mortal Glory: https://store.steampowered.com/app/10...
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How Long Does It Take to Make a Game by Yourself? // Indie Game Hours:    • How Long Does It Take to Make a Game ...  

Usually the biggest cost factor for games is graphics. The cost of graphics is largely affected by what kind of a game you want to make. A low-resolution pixel art game will be relatively cheap to make whereas a realistic 3D game with custom models will be a completely different beast. High quality art usually does not come cheap.

Then let’s move on to audio. Audio assets are also usually very cheap, unless you get them custom-made. A SFX pack from asset store will cost next to nothing but will likely include most of the audio assets your game needs.

Getting a custom soundtrack for your game is a cool idea and can easily elevate your game, but I think it’s more of a luxury item. There’s a lot of variation in pricing, but getting a professional composer to create a soundtrack for you could easily cost a few hundred dollars per minute of music.

Speaking of assets, there are a lot of pre-built modules available that can save you a lot of coding time. In general I would recommend trying to see if there are well-reviewed modules available for features that you think will take a lot of time to implement.

To get a game on Steam, you will need to pay the Steam direct fee, which is 100 dollars. This is something you need to pay for every game you want to get on Steam. But the good thing is that you can get this cost back if your game sells more than 1000 dollars.

Marketing is something you can spend as much money on as you have available. But if you are not made of money or don’t have previous experience in optimizing paid ads, I would recommend not spending a lot on marketing. What you actually need is some sort of a marketing plan and a continuous effort to carry out that plan. Money cannot replace these. Without a solid marketing plan, any money you spend is likely going down the drain.

Localizing your game can easily get very expensive. The price depends largely on the amount of words you have in your game, what languages you want to localize to and how good of a service you want.

Some other non-game-specific potential costs are:

Business fees & taxes, which will depend where your business is located in.

Then domain & hosting for your websites. These are quite cheap. I have a website set up for my studio that doesn’t get much traffic, but it’s nice to have as a hub that hosts all sorts of information, like presskits and directs people to other relevant platforms.

Then there are the costs that enable or improve your development, like equipment: all the devices you use during development, laptops, headphones, whatever.

Also all the software you use. You can definitely get far without paying anything for software and just using the free ones. I do that mostly, but some things are also worth paying for.

Marketing materials. To get a Steam page up and running, you need many different sizes of graphical assets. You can do it yourself, but art done by a professional will always be in it's own league and will attract customers to your page.

Trailer is another thing that is smart to get done by a professional, if you can afford it. But it won’t be cheap. From what I have read, getting a game trailer done by a professional editor would cost you a few thousand dollars or more.

Some might want to pay for additional services like testing, community management or maybe some help with porting the game for other platforms. If you are planning to get a publisher for your game, they will usually offer to help with these type of tasks.

Speaking of porting, if you want to get your game to other platforms than just pc, you might need to pay some platform-specific costs also. Whether that’s some developer fee or the price of a console devkit.

If you are making a multiplayer game, be prepared to pay for server costs. During development you can use your own device as a server, but after that you will need to get some actual dedicated servers. The cost for this largely depends on how many players your game has.