One of the most common questions we hear from clients is deceptively simple: "How much will my game cost?" The honest answer is always "it depends," but that does not mean we cannot give you a clear framework for understanding where the money goes and why.
Between David and Adam, our experience spans mobile, PC, educational games, legacy modernisation, and large live-game codebases. That gives us a useful planning framework for where budgets tend to go, even though the exact split changes substantially from project to project.
This post breaks down the major cost categories in a typical game development budget, explains what drives spending in each one, and offers guidance on where to prioritise when funds are limited.
The Five Core Budget Categories
For planning, we split game-development budgets into five core categories. The exact percentages shift with genre, scope, art requirements, platform targets, and team structure. The ranges below are heuristics based on the kinds of projects we scope, not universal industry benchmarks.
| Category | Typical Share | What It Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering | 40-50% | Gameplay programming, systems architecture, networking, platform porting |
| Art & Audio | 20-30% | 2D/3D art, animation, UI design, VFX, music, sound effects |
| Design | 10-15% | Game design, level design, economy balancing, UX research |
| QA & Testing | 5-10% | Functional testing, device testing, performance profiling, regression |
| Project Management | 5-10% | Production, scheduling, client communication, tooling |
These numbers assume you are working with an external development partner or agency. If you are building in-house, the ratios still hold, but the absolute numbers will include salary overheads, equipment, and office costs that are baked into agency rates.
Engineering: 40-50% of the Budget
Engineering is usually the largest cost on the projects we scope, and for good reason. Your engineers are not just writing gameplay code - they are building the foundational systems that everything else sits on top of.
What Drives Engineering Costs
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Core systems architecture - the skeleton of your game. This includes input handling, scene management, save systems, and the gameplay loop itself. A robust architecture pays dividends later; a fragile one creates exponential technical debt.
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Networking and multiplayer - if your game has any online component, expect engineering costs to increase significantly. Server-authoritative backends, state synchronisation, lag compensation, and matchmaking systems are complex and require specialist expertise. When we built the networking layer for Domi Online, we used FishNet on a cost-optimised AWS infrastructure specifically to keep operational expenses sustainable without sacrificing security or performance.
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Platform-specific work - shipping on iOS and Android is not simply "building once." Each platform has its own APIs, compliance requirements, input systems, and performance characteristics. Console porting adds another layer of complexity with certification requirements (TRC, XR, Lotcheck).
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Performance optimisation - mobile devices have strict thermal, memory, and battery constraints. David's previous work on RuneScape Mobile at Jagex reinforced how much engineering can sit behind making a desktop-scale game behave well on mobile hardware. Even much smaller games need profiling and optimisation passes on real devices.
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Third-party integrations - analytics, ad mediation, in-app purchases, authentication, cloud save, and push notifications. Each SDK integration carries its own implementation and maintenance cost.
Key Takeaway: Do not underestimate engineering costs for "simple" games. A 2D puzzle game still needs save systems, monetisation integration, device testing, and store compliance. The visible gameplay is often the smallest part of the engineering workload.
Where to Save
- Use proven frameworks and libraries rather than building everything from scratch. Our internal development framework shortens setup by reusing standardised components for audio, haptics, UI, and scene management instead of rebuilding the same foundations on every project.
- Prioritise your core loop. Get the one thing that makes your game fun working before investing in ancillary systems.
- Choose your platforms carefully at launch. Shipping on one platform first and porting later is almost always cheaper than simultaneous multi-platform development.
Art and Audio: 20-30% of the Budget
Art is what players see first. It drives store page conversion, first impressions, and perceived quality. But it is also the category where scope creep is most dangerous.
What Drives Art Costs
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Visual fidelity - a hyper-casual game with flat 2D art costs a fraction of a game with hand-painted environments and 3D character animations. The gap is enormous.
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Asset volume - an open-world game needs hundreds or thousands of unique assets. A puzzle game might need dozens. When we developed Empires Rise, our internal 4X strategy game, sourcing and integrating art assets across multiple civilisations and biomes was a significant production effort.
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Animation - character animation, UI animation, and VFX all require specialised skills. Skeletal animation systems (Spine, Unity's Animation Rigging) reduce costs compared to frame-by-frame approaches, but still require skilled artists.
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Audio - music, sound effects, and voice acting. Often underbudgeted, audio is critical to game feel. A good sound designer can make a £10,000 game feel like a £100,000 game.
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UI/UX design - interface design for games is a specialised discipline, particularly for mobile. Touch targets, safe areas, adaptive layouts, and platform-specific conventions all matter.
Where to Save
- Define your art style early and stick to it. Style changes mid-production are the single most expensive art decision.
- Use asset stores strategically for non-hero content (background foliage, generic sound effects), but invest in custom work for anything the player interacts with directly.
- Modular art pipelines reduce cost at scale. Design characters, environments, and UI elements as composable pieces rather than bespoke one-offs.
Design: 10-15% of the Budget
Game design is often the most undervalued line item, yet it has the highest leverage on your game's commercial success. A well-designed game with modest art will outperform a beautiful game with poor mechanics.
What Drives Design Costs
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Game Design Documentation (GDD) - the blueprint for your entire project. A thorough GDD covers mechanics, progression, economy, UI flows, and technical specifications. This document prevents expensive mid-production pivots.
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Economy and balancing - free-to-play games live or die by their economy design. Modelling currency flows, progression curves, and pricing requires data-driven iteration that continues well past launch.
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Level design - creating engaging content that uses your mechanics effectively. For Navigo, the educational game our team built during a previous agency tenure for the EU Horizon 2020 programme, designing 15 unique mini-games across four languages required extensive collaboration with educational specialists.
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User research and playtesting - testing with real players reveals problems that no amount of internal review will catch. Budget for at least two rounds of structured playtesting.
Where to Save
- Invest heavily in pre-production design. Every pound spent on design validation before production begins saves five to ten pounds in engineering rework.
- Use greybox prototyping to validate mechanics before committing to art production. We build playable Unity prototypes in our game design process specifically to find the fun before spending on final assets.
Key Takeaway: Design and prototyping are high-leverage spend. A clear GDD and an early playable prototype can expose expensive assumptions before they turn into production rework.
QA and Testing: 5-10% of the Budget
QA is the category that gets cut first when budgets tighten, and it is the category that causes the most damage when underfunded. A crash-heavy launch or a broken tutorial will tank your store rating and retention metrics.
What Drives QA Costs
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Device fragmentation - Android alone has thousands of device configurations. Testing across a representative set of screen sizes, chipsets, and OS versions is essential for mobile games.
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Regression testing - every new feature risks breaking existing ones. Systematic regression sweeps before each build delivery catch issues before players do.
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Performance profiling - ensuring stable frame rates, acceptable memory usage, and manageable thermal output across your target devices. This is particularly critical for mobile, where a game that overheats the phone will be uninstalled immediately.
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Platform certification - console submissions (TRC, XR, Lotcheck) require extensive pre-validation. A failed certification costs weeks of delay.
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Live service testing - if your game receives updates, every patch needs testing. Seasonal events, balance changes, and new content all carry regression risk.
Where to Save
- Automate where possible. Unit tests for core systems and automated build verification catch regressions cheaply.
- Prioritise the critical path. Test the first-time user experience and core gameplay loop exhaustively. Edge cases in rarely-used menus can wait.
- Integrate QA into your development pipeline from day one, not as an afterthought at the end of production.
Project Management: 5-10% of the Budget
Project management is the glue that holds everything together. It includes production scheduling, client communication, risk management, and the tools that enable the team to collaborate effectively.
What Drives PM Costs
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Team coordination - the larger the team and the more external dependencies (freelancers, external art studios, platform holders), the more management overhead is required.
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Client communication - regular sprint reviews, playable demos, and status reports take time to prepare but are essential for maintaining alignment.
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Tooling and infrastructure - Jira, Notion, version control (Git, Perforce, Plastic SCM), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud services all carry licence and maintenance costs.
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Risk management - identifying and mitigating technical and schedule risks before they become crises. A good producer pays for themselves many times over.
Where to Save
- Use agile methodologies with two-week sprints. Short cycles surface problems early when they are cheap to fix.
- Invest in good tooling. The cost of a Jira licence is trivial compared to the cost of miscommunication.
- Define scope clearly at project start. The single biggest driver of PM overhead is scope creep.
Budget Allocation by Game Type
The ranges below are illustrative planning examples, not fixed market prices. Existing code, supplied art, content volume, platform requirements, and technical risk can move a real quote substantially.
The percentages above are averages. Here is how they shift for common game types:
Mobile Casual / Hyper-Casual
- Engineering: 35-40%
- Art: 25-30%
- Design: 10-15%
- QA: 5-10%
- PM: 5-10%
- Total range: £30,000-150,000
Mobile Mid-Core (Strategy, RPG)
- Engineering: 40-50%
- Art: 20-30%
- Design: 10-15%
- QA: 5-10%
- PM: 5-10%
- Total range: £100,000-500,000
Multiplayer / Online Games
- Engineering: 45-55% (networking costs increase significantly)
- Art: 15-25%
- Design: 10-15%
- QA: 10-15% (multiplayer testing is more complex)
- PM: 5-10%
- Total range: £200,000-2,000,000+
Educational / Serious Games
- Engineering: 35-45%
- Art: 20-25%
- Design: 15-20% (curriculum alignment increases design work)
- QA: 5-10%
- PM: 5-10%
- Total range: £50,000-300,000
Planning Your Budget: Practical Steps
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Start with scope, not budget - define what your game needs to do before setting a number. Our game development cost estimator can help you build a baseline estimate.
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Build a contingency - leave meaningful budget and schedule margin for unknowns. The right percentage depends on how much of the design, technology, and content is already proven.
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Phase your investment - do not commit the entire budget before the riskiest assumptions have been tested. Use discovery and prototyping to decide whether the full production investment still makes sense.
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Understand the cost of delay - a three-month delay does not just cost three months of developer time. It costs three months of missed revenue, three months of market timing risk, and the opportunity cost of what your team could have built instead.
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Get an external estimate - even if you are building in-house, an external perspective on scope and cost can reveal blind spots. Our game development cost breakdown provides additional context on what drives pricing.
