HushCrasher: 80% games released on Steam over the past three years cost less than $1M to develop
The report also covers correlation between the budget and engine; probability of working with a publisher & other interesting numbers.
HushCrasher analyzed more than 100,000 games. To estimate development costs, they used the number of people listed in the credits, studio size, job descriptions, the number of supported languages, and many other factors. According to the authors, they also relied on direct information from studios and publicly available data.
The study sample included games released between 2022 and 2025 that received more than 10 reviews on Steam. In total, this covers 19,634 games.
80% of games on Steam cost less than $1M to develop. The largest number of projects (in absolute terms) falls into the $10,000–$100,000 budget range.
❗️To better understand this slide, it’s worth reading this article. The authors suggest classifying games not by budget, but by their size (in GB) and by the number of people in the credits. This is from where the terms Kei (solo-developer projects) and Midi projects come from.
The average budget for solo developers (Kei) is around $65,000. Projects by Midi developers cost roughly $885,000 on average.
According to HushCrasher estimates, the average AA project budget is $30 million, while the average AAA project budget is $309 million.
HushCrasher also analyzed engine usage across different project segments. The cheaper the game, the more popular Unity is. As budgets increase, the likelihood of using Unreal Engine or a proprietary in-house engine also increases.
Only 23% of developers on Steam work with publishers.
At the same time, projects that work with publishers have budgets that are, on average, 3–4 times higher than those developed without a publisher.
2D games are usually cheaper. On average, the budget of 3D games is 16 times higher.
❗️This large gap is explained by the fact that there are no (very few?) 2D games among major AAA hits.
Multiplayer games account for 16% of all games. However, they make up half of all games developed with budgets above $10 million.