The FTC vs Microsoft trial has caused spilling the beans on a lot of corporate secrets and dirty laundry. Such gems as Microsoft admitting Xbox lost the console wars – all to persuade the courts their acquisition of Activision won’t create a gaming monopoly.

What’s the most recent leak? Sony’s revenue on key titles – all because someone did a bad job with a sharpie/redaction.

What was revealed?

• Horizon Forbidden West cost $212 million over 5 years with 300 employees
• The Last of Us Part II cost $220 million over 90 months with 200 employees
• It appears Sony only shares about 10% (hard to read) of revenue with third party publishers like Activision
• About half of PS5 owners have a Nintendo Switch
• Call of Duty data:
  • Around 14? million users spend 30% or more of their PlayStation time playing Call of Duty
  • Over 6 million users spend more than 70% of their time playing Call of Duty
  • About 1 million users spend all their time on Playstation playing Call of Duty
  • CoD players an average of 116? hours per year
  • The document suggests CoD generated $800 million in the US alone in 2021. It generated $1.5 billion worldwide in 2021.
  • When you add merchandise, accessories, subscriptions, this jumps to $13.9 or $15.9 billion a year
  • Sony only has one more exclusive CoD game left in its exclusive marketing deal to be released in late 2023

This indicates that the average game dev employee cost $146,666 for each of the 2 titles – that’s without spending a dime on anything else (computers, studio equipment, licenses for 3rd party art/components, benefits etc). This means the average Sony game dev almost certainly made less (or a lot less) than $100,000/year range if you assume a very generously low 30% overhead cost per employee.

This seems less than the $115,000 average – though averages are bad indicators in game development because programmers and directors make substantially more than artists and content generators. You could also go to Glassdoor and get this info too.