Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Sunday, October 29, 2017, 12:45 (2583 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Korny, Sunday, October 29, 2017, 12:53

Hellblade’s budget is reportedly 10 million dollars.
Now, that’s small, but it isn’t THAT small. Nier Automata was only twice that much.

10 million actually seems like a reasonable fraction of an AAA budget. All of this AAA quality at an indie budget seems overhyped.

Do keep in mind that the game is self-published, and it was pretty heavily marketed, so a pretty size able chunk of their budget (which is, by their own words "way below $10 Million", not $10 Million) is devoted to that alone, since there's no Publisher with established experience/partnerships eating any of the cost, so Ninja Theory had to set up all those channels themselves, not to mention the tech that they had to develop for the game themselves, so you really can't compare it to a game like NieR: Automata on the basis of "budget" alone.

You should watch their dev diaries, they're very open about the game's development. This one in particular deals with self-publishing:

In case you don't read the linked article, they used the amount of "way less than $10 Million" to contrast the budget of a AAA game, which often starts at $50 million.
Also, saying that a AAA like N:A was "only" $20 Million is a bit disingenuous, since you know what tricks they had to do to make the game as huge as it is (cleverly tying replay value to story, so they only had to make about a third of the content that a team normally would for a game its size).