Quote Originally Posted by Jandor View Post
Have development costs gone up substantially though? People say it a lot but never provide any evidence for it.

I think running servers has actually gotten cheaper, hardware hasn't really gone up in price, wages have remained fairly stagnant across the developed world for the last decade.
If the 2013 financial reports are to be believed, we might still be paying for 1.0. It put the company over $400 million in the hole. It would take 4 million players buying ARR and HW to make up that cost, ARR AND HW development budgets notwithstanding. It would take around 600,000 players buying both expacs and keeping subbed for the entire duration of both expacs to pay for 1.0's loss to the company, to say nothing of 2.0, 3.0, and now 4.0's dev costs.

This isn't accounting for things like...Mogstation sales, premium streams, physical merchandise sales, CE sales or any revenue generated from commercial crossover events (if any), though. So those things are likely why the game is still considered successful despite not having that 600k player figure I cited above (and hasn't since HW launch, IIRC). It's not perfect computational math, but hopefully it gives a ballpark on exactly how much SE seems to spend as a company in general (FFXV projected budget over 600 mil top kek).