inXile: AA development costs have went from $5-$6 million in 2012 to $15-$20 million today

[Mecaknight]

Rising costs is what will cause this industry to consolidate until it resembles Hollywood. A handful of huge players that own just about everything and a couple of smaller independent operations here and there.

Take Two's Private Division is a silver lining we can hope will be emulated so we might lose indies but retain auteurs.

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The day the AA die, is the day I stop completely playing new productions excepting (specific) Nintendo ones. No amount of "auteurs" will get back the experimentation that were the marks of AA development. If "Hollywood" sized games is the future of the industry, they'll do it without me. I'm sure I'm not alone on this, even if I may not represent a sizable chunk of the mass market.

That's a big part of it, our expectation of all levels of these games goes up over time almost invisibly. It works fine if you're an indie making a retro game, though even those have pretty high expectations on animation quality for most games now. But like, a PS2 looking AA game is still well below standard these days.

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It's what will ultimately kill (or at least neuter) the game industry at the end. The race for graphics led to costly development even though the PS2 era graphics was just perfect to experiment and show any concept while remaining on a bearable budgets. There's nothing I'd like to see more than new minecraft like games, Kerball Space Program like ones and they are all pretty doable in PS2 graphics.

 

[Hey Please]

Well, also, you just have to keep up with industry standards to an extent to be taken seriously.

Like, look at the reactions people have to the graphics in Bloodstained or Left Alive. They really hurt the perception of the games. Now, they could be bad otherwise, but no one wants to run into these kinds of issues in such a competitive market.

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Indeed. Given the og quote came from inxile, my focus was solely on isometric games (I completely forgot about AA development that was outside that perspective).

Player demands aren't solely graphical; as featuresets get added to one game, others have to follow suit to compete, and then they become "standard features" that a title will get criticised for not having.
eg If you're making an open world game, its pretty likely players want faster travel options like vehicles, they want day / night cycles, they want weather effects, they want an inventory, they want a crating system, they want a levelling system, they want player customisation options.
Each of these features might once have been a USP for any given open world title, but are now expected as 'standard'. And each of those features each exponentially add to the cost of making a 'basic' title.

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I understand. Thanks.

 

[TheSyldat]

Player demands aren't solely graphical; as featuresets get added to one game, others have to follow suit to compete, and then they become "standard features" that a title will get criticised for not having.
eg If you're making an open world game, its pretty likely players want faster travel options like vehicles, they want day / night cycles, they want weather effects, they want an inventory, they want a crating system, they want a levelling system, they want player customisation options.
Each of these features might once have been a USP for any given open world title, but are now expected as 'standard'. And each of those features each exponentially add to the cost of making a 'basic' title.

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And let's not even dive into the conversation of what features "retro inspired" titles brought on the table and are now expected by gamers.

For level based game fast restart of the level (which is neat to have as a speedrunner , therefore I won't complain, but bein I coded one in Godot for fast iteration , I see how much of a timing nightmare a fast reset feature is to code )
And fast reset/restart is just the tip of the iceberg.
Good in game timers
Fast load times
multiple controllers support on PC (be it on linux or windows)
The list goes on.

Assault Android Cactus is a real good solid mind blowingly fun top down twin stick shooter.

No doubt here , but the three "wizkids" at Witchbeam place the bar of players expectations real skyhigh as a result.
And with what Hollow Knight by team cherry introduced ...
Do I really need to develop.

Yes even "sacrificing the pretties" isn't enough and at some point you need to ask yourself if your toolset really is the biggest bang for your buck , and if your rent isn't way too pricy for your survival.

 

[Deleted member 41271]

Threads like this always makes me giggle due to the people that somehow expect that the videogame industry somehow is the only industry not affected by rising costs. Gamers are so clueless sometimes (willfully so if Sterling followers, obviously - he sure keeps shouting that cost didn't increase, even if they blatantly did).

Yooka Layle is one of the games that actually shows *why* you need more than just better art. The game would, if made back in the day, have been an absolute master piece. But we're 20 years later, and people expect more - better graphics, more content, but also more in the gameplay department. And systems don't come cheap. All systems need programming testing, art for UI, more testing to see how they work with other features.

It's an exponential increase. The more systems you have, the more cost grows on ALL fronts. Not just graphics. Testing grows - as systems have effects on each other - and the overall bloating budget then pushes marketing costs (or your product will never be seen and tank).

 

[Harlequin]

Unity doesn't do everything for you , and also don't forget that on the asset store a lot of things are paid for and not free at all and the price can add up real quick
Add to that middleware for sound design such as Wwise , special propietary distributed cross compiling software solutins (despite Canonical having something way better way quicker way more flexible for way cheaper "but you need to learn how to linux to use it though" that's your fucking job mate ! )
Etc etc etc

Again a lot of that cost could have been slashed down by half with better decisions being made when it comes to the creation of their production pipeline and where they were renting ...

Big structures such as Ubi and EA that have been existing for long having difficulty to transition I can understand and defend. InXile on the other hand was founded out of pure cloth everything needed to get off the ground , and rather than be smart about it they chose to take the path of least resistance, now they are biting the bullet.

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And also stuff like Autodesk's 3D editing tools which could, in large parts, be replaced by Blender. Or Adobe's software, a lot of which has cheaper/free equivalents out there. And sure, Maya/Max and Photoshop are industry standards so you'd probably lose some money in the beginning training employees to use your cheaper toolset but the money you'll end up saving over time should more than make up for it.

I think, over time, there will also be more of a move to democratise asset creation. You can already see some of it happening with the Unity and Unreal asset stores and certain texture/material/model sharing sites but in the future, there'll hopefully be a whole lot more of that which should enable indie studios to keep their operations leaner and smaller. There are so many generic objects that show up in so many different games, it simply doesn't make sense to create a new asset from scratch for those for every single one of those games. (Unless your game has a very specific art style or sth.)

 

[Chief Malik]

I wanted to split this off from the rest of the Brian Fargo interview because I thought it was worth it's own discussion.

It also fits with the sea of AA developers lining up to be acquired over the past 3-5 years.



Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-11-19-inxile-acquired-by-microsoft-the-interview

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So where do games that are profitable off japan sales alone (like persona 5) rank in terms of budget? Those games certainly don't look like 15 million $ games or any other modern "AA" game I can think of.

 

[TheSyldat]

Threads like this always makes me giggle due to the people that somehow expect that the videogame industry somehow is the only industry not affected by rising costs. Gamers are so clueless sometimes (willfully so if Sterling followers, obviously - he sure keeps shouting that cost didn't increase, even if they blatantly did).

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Hey no Sterling is not saying cost didn't increase he says the cost did increase yes but the price spike is mostly going in shareholders pockets rather than in the well being and the wellness of well rested employees...
Don't twist his words please. I know some drones spend their time twisting his words but please don't indulge them .

 

[Oreiller]

It really depends on where your studio is located too. The Surge costed around 5 million euros and Vampyr around 10. But yeah, games are more and more expensive to make.

 

[Nirolak]

So where do games that are profitable off japan sales alone (like persona 5) rank in terms of budget? Those games certainly don't look like 15 million $ games or any other modern "AA" game I can think of.

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Well, Japan is a bit different, because their local market has different expectations, and pays very high prices for games.

It's not uncommon for PS4 games to be $80-$90+ there, Japanese wages are like half what it costs to hire people in the West when you factor everything in, and they vastly prefer to buy local games, removing a lot of the harsh competition in the market.

Retailers can't do refunds in Japan either, so if you ship in 250,000 copies to be sold at $90, and keep $70 of that per copy, you get $17.5 million (minus taxes) to cover your $7.5-$10 million budget (that gets you as much mileage as $15-$20 million in California), regardless of whether any of those copies sell or the price those copies sell at. By comparison, if a retailer cuts your $40 AA game's price in half to move it, you only get a cut of the $20 they sold it at, not the cut you would have at $40.

Persona 5 itself is also aided a lot by being a Game of the Year quality title, which isn't really reasonable to expect of everyone

This is why a lot of the comparisons that are like "Why don't Western mid-tier devs operate like Japan?" don't tend to pan out unless the developer is in Eastern Europe, where a similar (though not exactly the same) situation exists.

 

[Mecaknight]

Yooka Layle is one of the games that actually shows *why* you need more than just better art. The game would, if made back in the day, have been an absolute master piece. But we're 20 years later, and people expect more - better graphics, more content, but also more in the gameplay department. And systems don't come cheap. All systems need programming testing, art for UI, more testing to see how they work with other features.

It's an exponential increase. The more systems you have, the more cost grows on ALL fronts. Not just graphics. Testing grows - as systems have effects on each other - and the overall bloating budget then pushes marketing costs (or your product will never be seen and tank).

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I've just finished "the return of Obra Dinn" today. And I disagree with some of your points.
In term of graphics, a good art direction can hide something that would be pretty ugly like the 3D models in Obra Dinn, animations that would be costly are completely absent and it's explained by the rules of the game (you hear what happens before someone dies and relive the exact moment of their death, which means everything is static). Obra Dynn is the perfect example of how a good concept can avoid most problems that would cost much more if it tried to do exactly the same thing that a similar game was trying to do. Not every games need very complex systems, and those which try different things can spare money by hiding what's too costly to make. If it's doable by indies, it's doable for AAs.

 

[Ganondolf]

Which games would be consider a double A game?

 

[element]

It really depends on where your studio is located too. The Surge costed around 5 million euros and Vampyr around 10. But yeah, games are more and more expensive to make.

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Living and operating in a country that provides universal health care takes a huge burden off the employer in terms of operation cost.

 

[Sid]

Costs have risen and dev times have been elongated significantly this gen leading to much fewer releases (AAA and AA) than last gen, I remember Uncharted 2 had a budget of 20 million.

 

[Bhonar]

It's what will ultimately kill (or at least neuter) the game industry at the end. The race for graphics led to costly development even though the PS2 era graphics was just perfect to experiment and show any concept while remaining on a bearable budgets. There's nothing I'd like to see more than new minecraft like games, Kerball Space Program like ones and they are all pretty doable in PS2 graphics.

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Sorry, but if you want graphics advancement to stop at PS2-level, then I'm glad you're not in the video game industry.

 

[Mecaknight]

Sorry, but if you want graphics advancement to stop at PS2-level, then I'm glad you're not in the video game industry.

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The word "advancement" is shedding a positive light on what is essentially a sacrifice. You've probably seen the picture bellow time and time again.

But it's going to be a reality sooner or later. The race for graphical fidelity is coming to an end and it has cost way too much for what it brought to games and gameplay themselves.

 

[Bhonar]

The word "advancement" is shedding a positive light on what is essentially a sacrifice. You've probably seen the picture bellow time and time again.

But it's going to be a reality sooner or later. The race for graphical fidelity is coming to an end and it has cost way too much for what it brought to games and gameplay themselves.

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Yeah nowdays sure, but not PS2-level

 

[Deleted member 5167]

And also stuff like Autodesk's 3D editing tools which could, in large parts, be replaced by Blender. Or Adobe's software, a lot of which has cheaper/free equivalents out there. And sure, Maya/Max and Photoshop are industry standards so you'd probably lose some money in the beginning training employees to use your cheaper toolset but the money you'll end up saving over time should more than make up for it.

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And everyone could use Linux instead of Windows.
But the fact of the matter is that because industry standard tools are industry standard, certain things like plugins required to be used for compatibility with engines without having to create your own toolchain require using industry standard software, and retraining skilled employees to use software they are unfamiliar with and don't actually want to use is a huge timesink.
Its quibbling over pennies. The software used is a drop in the bucket of total expenditure.

Hey no Sterling is not saying cost didn't increase he says the cost did increase yes but the price spike is mostly going in shareholders pockets rather than in the well being and the wellness of well rested employees...
Don't twist his words please. I know some drones spend their time twisting his words but please don't indulge them .

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Jim sterling did in fact claim that costs had gone down, because he looked at a financial report showing product expenditure had decreased, but couldn't be bothered to do the basic fact checking that released products had also gone down, and that cost per product = product expenditure divided by number of products released.

 

[TheSyldat]

Jim sterling did in fact claim that costs had gone down, because he looked at a financial report showing product expenditure had decreased, but couldn't be bothered to do the basic fact checking that released products had also gone down, and that cost per product = product expenditure divided by number of products released.

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Again no he also bring that nuance as well saying otherwise is being completely disingenous at best maliciously driven at worst drop it just drop it here ...

And everyone could use Linux instead of Windows.
But the fact of the matter is that because industry standard tools are industry standard, certain things like plugins required to be used for compatibility with engines without having to create your own toolchain require using industry standard software, and retraining skilled employees to use software they are unfamiliar with and don't actually want to use is a huge timesink.
Its quibbling over pennies. The software used is a drop in the bucket of total expenditure.

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Again I said it myself and I'll say it again "When you're an already establish house ? Yeah this hold water and heck I'll join the fray in painting the full picture of how much of an undertaking it represents with very little percievable returns ... for an esthablished house"

But let me say it again , when you start fresh a whole new studio you can and should work your butt at ensuring your software independence and create an environment where share cooperation is key and is in fact the rule rather than the exception. And InXile had an opportunity to do so but they didn't .

So again your point is valid yes.... for an established studio for one that is getting off the ground and in the making no the conversation is worth having.

 

[Thomas Puha]

Thanks.

To the underlined portion: I take it the increase in the number of people on a given project, if mostly artists, is due to the expansive asset creation even though the underlying game itself is not redefining the genre.

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I dont want to get into looong specifics, but ...its not just the game team that grows. The bigger the game team is, the more HR, management, larger office, more epxenses, more of everything is required. It all adds up. Even more specialized people, so salaries are higher. etc. Feature expectation in games in this day and age is pretty much sky-high. None of its easy or simple to do.

People also seem to forget that its not about just recouping the cost, its about keeping the studio going for the next few years, so even if you make a few hundred million, the publisher and developer need their cut and when you got thousands of employees...it all adds up.

 

[TheYanger]

The word "advancement" is shedding a positive light on what is essentially a sacrifice. You've probably seen the picture bellow time and time again.

But it's going to be a reality sooner or later. The race for graphical fidelity is coming to an end and it has cost way too much for what it brought to games and gameplay themselves.

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Ok? And PS2 level is that second image (In sheer poly count that's ps1 level, but it's also just a bust. imagine the entire character model at that detail and it's roughly a ps2 game).

 

[Ushay]

500k to break even, 500k x 30 = 15m USD


15m USD - 30% of Steam/GoG/PSN cut = 10.5m USD

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Damn Hellbalde production was lean as fuck compared to today's standards, no wonder MS approached them for acquisition.

 

[Mikebison]

Don't need to spend that money when you're making Xbox live avatars and Kinect 3 games

 

[Neonep]

Well we should see games go up to at a minimum $70 next gen.

 

[RestEerie]

going by the amount of money invested in it vis a vis the number of 'As' the game is categorized, is Star Citizen a AAAAAA game then?

 

[hikarutilmitt]

Hellblade's data seems to at least loosely support my thought that a whole lot of the industry needs far better project management. I'd like to see the numbers for budget, staffing, and actual man-hours comparing a typical not gigantic western aaa (EA or Ubisoft) to a similarly made Japanese one (not Squeenix).

You could even throw in a measure of needed patches and post-release support like DLC for good measure.

 

[Chainsawkitten]

Again no he also bring that nuance as well saying otherwise is being completely disingenous at best maliciously driven at worst drop it just drop it here ...



Again I said it myself and I'll say it again "When you're an already establish house ? Yeah this hold water and heck I'll join the fray in painting the full picture of how much of an undertaking it represents with very little percievable returns ... for an esthablished house"

But let me say it again , when you start fresh a whole new studio you can and should work your butt at ensuring your software independence and create an environment where share cooperation is key and is in fact the rule rather than the exception. And InXile had an opportunity to do so but they didn't .

So again your point is valid yes.... for an established studio for one that is getting off the ground and in the making no the conversation is worth having.

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A new studio does not start from scratch. Retraining artists that have been using Autodesk for years to use Blender is going to take a long time. Far more than it would cost to just buy Autodesk. If you hire artists who have studied at college, they will have trained using the industry standard. If you're hiring artists who have worked in the industry, they've been using the industry standard. If you're not hiring either of those, who are you hiring?

 

[OneBadMutha]

I may be naive in saying this...but I think we're getting close to those costs going down for standard games. Due to machine learning, I believe developers will become a lot more efficient in the near future. Cost for artists, writers, actors, etc won't decrease but it will take less programmers to do the same work. I'm not in game development but I do manage a team in technology and see the stuff coming in the future. If every other tech industry is expecting advances in A.I., machine learning and tools that automate a lot of grindy tasks to result in drastic efficiencies, why wouldn't that also be felt in game development?

I'm happy for InXile but I'm expecting a resurgence in AA games 5 to 10 years from now. There are diminishing returns in adding more detail. Once lighting goes to Real Time Ray Tracing and more advanced CPUs can give coders more room to leave less efficient code as is, I expect Indie studios to reach AA quality more frequently.

 

[sickvisionz]

Why did the cost triple? Like if they wanted to remake that game. Not improve or change anything, just literally remake that project. Same # of assets, same quality of assets, exact same everything... the cost of doing that have tripled in 6 years? Everything I've heard about developer compensation leads me to believe that 2018 game dev salaries aren't triple what they were in 2012. Where is the cost coming from? Graphic artist salaries tripled from 2012 to 2018? In 2012 it took one person to make this model. In 2018 in literally takes 3 people to make that same exact model?

There was a rejection of the AAA mindset that every project has to be bigger, more massive, more expansive, more detailed, and more involved than the last one. That this was just an unbreakable rule of game design. To me, that's what those 2012 costs are.

The 2018 costs are the reveal that none of those devs really had any issue with the AAA mind state. Something about their current job situation bothered them, but it totally wasn't he AAA mindset. I say that because while they said stuff to suggest it was a rejection of AAA in those Kickstarters, all of them seem to have adopted that mindset the first chance they saw some success and could get their own studio off the ground. Like across the board they got right back into the rat race as soon as they could.

We probably need a new naming system. Now we're going to be on like A vs AA when it should really be like studios satisfied with where they are and the type of games they make vs studios that want to constantly expand and do bigger and bigger projects. One of those will always be able to make games for "low" amounts of money and the other will always triple their average budget every 6 years.

 

[Valdega]

Why did the cost triple? Like if they wanted to remake that game. Not improve or change anything, just literally remake that project. Same # of assets, same quality of assets, exact same everything... the cost of doing that have tripled in 6 years? Everything I've heard about developer compensation leads me to believe that 2018 game dev salaries aren't triple what they were in 2012. Where is the cost coming from?

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I'm pretty sure they're talking about the cost of making new AA games, not porting old AA games. Standards have risen considerably over the past decade, especially in the indie space. Modern indies are basically AA games by the old standards.

 

[Brown Intruder]

Don't need to spend that money when you're making Xbox live avatars and Kinect 3 games

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??

 

[mujun]

gone

 

[Deleted member 8593]

??

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It's a dumb allusion to what Rare was "forced" to do during the Kinect phase of XBOX.

 

[Atolm]

People also delude themselves if they think AAA games cost nowadays 60$. RDR2 is 75€ on EU PSN, and let's not forget the monetisation that will come when the online launchs.

Forza Horizon 4 is 100$ with the expansions, and the series has had MTs shoveled into your face since the first in 2012. And so on.

Devs complain about rising costs, and it's understandable, but my salary hasn't gone up in the past 10 or 15 years either and I want to make the most of it. They're not running a charity here, but neither am I.

 

[Ushay]

Don't need to spend that money when you're making Xbox live avatars and Kinect 3 games

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What?

 

[ConHaki66]

People also delude themselves if they think AAA games cost nowadays 60$. RDR2 is 75€ on EU PSN, and let's not forget the monetisation that will come when the online launchs.

Forza Horizon 4 is 100$ with the expansions, and the series has had MTs shoveled into your face since the first in 2012. And so on.

Devs complain about rising costs, and it's understandable, but my salary hasn't gone up in the past 10 or 15 years either and I want to make the most of it. They're not running a charity here, but neither am I.

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What a load of bullshit, they release meaningful expansions and have unintrusive mt

 

[Necronomicon]

500k to break even, 500k x 30 = 15m USD


15m USD - 30% of Steam/GoG/PSN cut = 10.5m USD

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I think it's very not informative this panel about costs.
Where they did spend the 10.000.000? I don't think they pay the 20 people 200.000 dollar a year, so there is not enough information to judge the costs.

 

[Blackpuppy]

Over 85 posts and no snarky grammar replies. I have died and have went to heaven!

 

[Deleted member 5167]

my salary hasn't gone up in the past 10 or 15 years either

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ummmmmmmm...... not sure how to break it to you, but you're getting screwed if that claim is accurate.

 

[Anthony Hopkins]

15-20m for AA game? That's not bad actually... but no wonder they needed MS' support

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Hopefully MS will give them $50 million so they can make something on the level of hellblade, and beyond.

 

[Water]

The word "advancement" is shedding a positive light on what is essentially a sacrifice. You've probably seen the picture bellow time and time again.

But it's going to be a reality sooner or later. The race for graphical fidelity is coming to an end and it has cost way too much for what it brought to games and gameplay themselves.

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Posting this picture is very ignorant and is flat out not true. You're either trolling or have a lack of understand on how graphics are progressing. This won't be a "reality" anytime soon and real-time graphics have a very, very long way to go.

Poly count is just one of the many things that drive advancement in graphics, and even if you are only basing things off of polycounts this image is 100% false of the amount of detail you can get.

Edit: is posting this image still banable? I know it used to be... lol.

 

[Wing Scarab]

And also stuff like Autodesk's 3D editing tools which could, in large parts, be replaced by Blender. Or Adobe's software, a lot of which has cheaper/free equivalents out there. And sure, Maya/Max and Photoshop are industry standards so you'd probably lose some money in the beginning training employees to use your cheaper toolset but the money you'll end up saving over time should more than make up for it.

I think, over time, there will also be more of a move to democratise asset creation. You can already see some of it happening with the Unity and Unreal asset stores and certain texture/material/model sharing sites but in the future, there'll hopefully be a whole lot more of that which should enable indie studios to keep their operations leaner and smaller. There are so many generic objects that show up in so many different games, it simply doesn't make sense to create a new asset from scratch for those for every single one of those games. (Unless your game has a very specific art style or sth.)

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This is exactly what the studio I work with does. We buy assets and then tailor it for our need. I remember we got quoted £20,000 per character we needed modeled for a project, which was way too much. In the end we ended up buying a model off a 3D website and tailored the character to our needs. Our 3D artist only had to change a couple of stuff and the character looked exactly like our concept art.

 

[Marcus Brutalius]

I'm not a native English speaker, but I have a grammar-nazi membership card:...costs have gone....

Over 85 posts and no snarky grammar replies. I have died and have went to heaven!

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LOL

 

[mujun]

Over 85 posts and no snarky grammar replies. I have died and have went to heaven!

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Did you miss mine?

 

[Blackpuppy]

Did you miss mine?

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I did! Drats. Beaten!

 

[Jaded Alyx]

gone

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Second time the OP did this in a title. I thought this was the same thread at first.

 

[Tarot Deck]

Artists. It's almost always artists.

More geometry to model. More textures to paint. More animations to rig.

We went from a programmer dominated industry to an artist dominated industry.

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Interesting.

 

[Principate]

Well, Japan is a bit different, because their local market has different expectations, and pays very high prices for games.

It's not uncommon for PS4 games to be $80-$90+ there, Japanese wages are like half what it costs to hire people in the West when you factor everything in, and they vastly prefer to buy local games, removing a lot of the harsh competition in the market.

Retailers can't do refunds in Japan either, so if you ship in 250,000 copies to be sold at $90, and keep $70 of that per copy, you get $17.5 million (minus taxes) to cover your $7.5-$10 million budget (that gets you as much mileage as $15-$20 million in California), regardless of whether any of those copies sell or the price those copies sell at. By comparison, if a retailer cuts your $40 AA game's price in half to move it, you only get a cut of the $20 they sold it at, not the cut you would have at $40.

Persona 5 itself is also aided a lot by being a Game of the Year quality title, which isn't really reasonable to expect of everyone

This is why a lot of the comparisons that are like "Why don't Western mid-tier devs operate like Japan?" don't tend to pan out unless the developer is in Eastern Europe, where a similar (though not exactly the same) situation exists.

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This is becoming increasingly untrue as fair as PS4 games are concerned. Many western franchises have stabilized or grown this gen whereas a great many Japanese third party games from larger franchises have dramatically shrunk.

 

[Deleted member 5167]

This is becoming increasingly untrue as fair as PS4 games are concerned. Many western franchises have stabilized or grown this gen whereas a great many Japanese third party games from larger franchises have dramatically shrunk.

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The PS4 is not a product aimed at the Japanese market, and people who bought a PS4 are sort of stuck with the library available.

 

[TheMango55]

I think it's very not informative this panel about costs.
Where they did spend the 10.000.000? I don't think they pay the 20 people 200.000 dollar a year, so there is not enough information to judge the costs.

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Rent, equipment, software licenses, marketing, health insurance, taxes, general office supplies, etc. it's expensive to run a business.

 

[Principate]

The PS4 is not a product aimed at the Japanese market, and people who bought a PS4 are sort of stuck with the library available.

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Yes but It is still the device that has gotten the vast majority of third party support in Japan which is what we're talking about here.