Mark Darrah 警告 CD Projekt 与其他 AAA 工作室因开发成本飙升而处境危险

Photo: InvenGlobal (all rights reserved)

Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah has said CD Projekt is in a dangerous position as the cost of making big-budget games keeps climbing, Rock Paper Shotgun reported.

Darrah made the comments in an interview printed in the Summer Eternal Anthology. The 500-page book is tied to Red Rooster, a new RPG from a splinter group of former Disco Elysium developers. Rock Paper Shotgun's Edwin was sent photos of the interview pages.

Darrah led teams on Anthem and Dragon Age. He began his career as a programmer on Jade Empire, Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate.

Specialisation Is Inflating Team Sizes

Darrah said triple-A development has become so specialised that it is now fragile. In his telling, no single person can add anything to a big game alone. It takes at least five people to do so.

That pushes headcounts up, and costs with them. Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber Interactive, gave Rock Paper Shotgun some numbers last month. Willits said 200 developers at $15,000 each per month adds up to well over two million dollars.

One Month Late Can Cost Millions

Darrah said larger teams are more exposed to schedule slips. He estimated that a 500-person team running a month behind adds five to ten million dollars to a budget. Small hiccups make that easy to do, he said.

Rock Paper Shotgun applied the same maths to Grand Theft Auto VI. A making-of feature by journalist Jason Schreier reported that Rockstar's head of publishing, Jennifer Kolbe, had to tell Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick about a delay from 2025 to May 2026.

Then came another, to November. With more than 4,700 people on the project, Rock Paper Shotgun estimated the slips may have cost more than $500m.

Prototyping and Cancelled Projects

Darrah speculated that big studios linger in prototyping because it is the one phase where developers are still free to be creative.

Willits told Rock Paper Shotgun that a full team before a vertical slice (an early playable sample of the finished game) simply burns money.

Rock Paper Shotgun pointed to the cancellations of Perfect Dark and Everwild as examples. Executives pulled the plug in pre-production once costs mounted.

A Split Between Mega-Budget Games and the Rest

Darrah predicted the industry will split. Grand Theft Auto VI, he said, will pull five or six games up into a tier where spending any amount is acceptable. He suggested Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty and Battlefield could join it.

Too many games with $100m budgets, he said, are failing to earn that money back.

He described BioWare as sitting at the point where the model does not quite work. EA chief executive Andrew Wilson said Dragon Age: The Veilguard had underperformed. It reached 1.5 million players against a plan for 3 million.

On CD Projekt's own plans, Inven Global reported that the company has finalised worldbuilding for Hadar, its first original IP. The project is now entering development.

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