Skull and Bones burned $200 million, and the artists were never the problem
I Have Never Seen a Game Fail Because the Artists Were Too Slow
Rework eats 30 to 50 percent of development effort and costs about 2.5 times the original build, yet studios track artist days and ignore the price of reversed decisions. Skull and Bones changed its core premise at least four times across eight years and roughly $200 million, while headcount grew from 100 to 400. Faster AI generation doesn't fix a broken steering wheel — it just increases the volume of work in flight when a pivot lands.
Four hundred people executing against a brief that keeps moving is a production failure with an enormous payroll attached. Nothing about it gets cheaper when the payroll works faster.
- LarsDu88
I tried to read this, but this post was so obviously written by AI, it made it hard to proceed. There's a few human written paragraphs written in the first person that have a jarringly different flow form the AI written portions.
- hankbond
Core topic seems worth discussing but I gave up halfway thru after reading too many LLM-isms.
- maccard
Art costs are probably the most predictable part of game development (they’re also a large part of it). If you go to an outsource studio and tell them what you want you’ll get a variety of quotes depending on the level of quality you want.
The articles point us mostly right but this isn’t new to the AI age.
> None of them could tell me the cost of a decision that got reversed six months later.
Absolutely everyone in a game studio knows that the cost of a bad decision scales with the number of people working in the project, and all the good leads know the decisions that are easy to revisit. There’s only two terminal decisions in a game project (IME - I’d love to know if there’s another). Not finding the fun, and scaling too early.
> Headcount grew from roughly 100 people in 2015 to around 400 by 2019
Skull and bones shipped in 2024. Pandemic notwithstanding, this checks the “scaled too early” box