Is there a website or other source from where I can easily find out the final cost - and possibly generated revenue - of videogames?

https://www.gamasutra.com/
From time to time they have reports and/or dev diaries about such things, though I'm not sure if they give out exact sales numbers.

Some thoughts about it, while not 100% educated in affairs within the video game industry, I may still provide some insights.

So in general the production cost of a moderate indie-game should be around 55.000 to 275.000 USD, depending on lawcosts and some insurence costs covered. From the "cheapest" indie game standpoints, the guy who made "The Next Penelope" (look him up, can't find the link since the dev moved on I guess) wrote in his post-mortem blogpost that his wife had to take care of the household because he was mostly working throughout 16 hours a day and that law expenses were overstraining his financial capacities far too much for 2 years. Note that this game was made by a single developer.

Lots of indie devs commision their work, which means that they hire people to work for them overseas (locationdependant obviously).

A lot of higher-budget indiegames of studios that had some success stories cost around 500.000 to a million bucks to make. Most of the money is simply to finance their teams. A 10$ indie games on Steam makes around 7$ in revenue. Most of it goes into company infrastructure. I would say that around 4$ is saved and given to the employees.

AAA Games cost around 12m $ (Supreme Commander 2) to around 140m $ (GTA 5). You can add twice as much budget if you want marketing, which would add another 140m towards a game of the scale such as GTA 5. The games are more expensive because of Research and Development and acquiring/financing the right people.

So the "regular" figure for any popular game is around 10m $ if the studio is smaller (around 20-30+ developers) and around 100m $ if the studio is huge (500+ developers)

I once calculated that any large Ubisoft game does cost around 47m $ to 65m $ PER YEAR. So Assassins Creed: Origins would cost around 130m $. You can easily calculate it yourself. Just look up how much a programmer cost per month and multiply it by 800 to 1100 (which is how many people work on every Assassins Creed game). Also note that there are multiple studios throughout the world, so getting context dependant values is also important because countries obviously value workers different (and ubisoft has a lot of studios throughout the world).

Ron Gilbert wrote this blog entry about how he budgeted Thimbleweed Park:
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1

It's a very interesting read.

I've made 2 games all by myself (graphics, sounds, scripting, game design) using Unreal Engine 4.
It did not cost me a dime, only time. Time is money though but as a hobby, making games can be quite fun.

These days, with free and professional game engines like Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, making a game can be done at no cost. If you want a tool to create 3D models, Blender is available for free (and is a good alternative to costly software like Autodesk Maya and 3DS Max). If you want to create sprites, GIMP (an image manipulation software similar to Adobe Photoshop) is free. Krita is another free alternative (or you can buy it on Steam for a few bucks to support the devs). Other tools like Corel Painter Essentials, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Pro-Motion NG, Aseprite are all under $100.

Learning game dev can be done freely by watching YouTube videos or by buying cheap Udemy Courses. There are also very cheap E-Books to learn programming and game development in C, C++, C# etc...

Many PC games on itch.io, Gamejolt.com and Steam were made by a single person. Even if that person bought some art assets like 3D models or sprites to use in a commercial game, it would amount to around a few hundred dollars of budget.

But still, pretty much anybody these days can make a small, short game that runs fine and create everything by themselves.

My two games are short and VERY BASIC and pretty dumb as well but if I could do it, then anybody could. My games are as far from AAA games as a homeless man is from Jeff Bezos but they are still working games and they qualify as such.

I am always surprised to see the budgets for professional games out there.

Production Cost: 48 million

Retail Cost: $29.95

Finding out the princess is in another fucking castle: Priceless

If you understand that time is money, indeed so when the time is spent in a professional setting among people who need to pay their bills and taxes and earn some fun money too, it shouldn't be that surprising.

Yeah from what I gathered is that free games rank from 0$ to lets say even several thousand bucks (as you implied some assets still cost money), it depends on how deep you are in your hobby of game development of course.

Personally I tried to code a whole ASCII-roguelike engine in Python with some success but it was unoptimized, it also lagged in some parts and even broke, but its something I did for myself without any help. Its also an extremly time consuming thing to do. But I learned something valueable of what I've already kind of understood, that people who make games seriously put their damn lives into it, even if its just a free game.

On the other hand, I've payed some hundred bucks in some game makers and assets just to have fun with during the last two decades. Its a fun past-time just playing around with that kind of stuff thats for sure.

The most ambigious thing, sans the engine-project, was a (almost) monochrome Metroidvania project that I tried by using GM that I tried to make. Besides understanding why a lot of devs like making these types of games I also found out that you have to metriciously plan a lot of things in order to make it proper (worldbuilding, bosses) as even a single boss did take around two months of past-time work. Making a simple, not pretty Metroidvania with dozends of Bosses, believable enemies and a world is probably what I could do, even if it would realistically require around 7-12 years to make. Its because of stuff like this that I don't even believe that long development times aren't even that long, its just that slight problems can significantly lenghen the process even if you're a professional during crunchtime. Learning the things needed can take a long time if you're not accustumed to it.

Look at games like Iconoclasts for instance that took a similar approach, though its done by an experienced developer and is far more sophisticated than the stuff I've attempted to make of course. Not only that, but the game also took like 10 years to make and for good reason.

So with this said, I do believe is what matters more is that you're doing stuff with fun in mind rather than your budget or even time. Learn and practice by experience and then focus on what you enjoy most. There definitely are people who prefer a "game made with your heart" rather than the other extreme that is a "technically perfect game" thats for sure.

EDIT: Added some stuff and make things slightly more readable.

Modern game development is cheap....

Get a 40 year old game, rework it for use on the mobile, and all the seals will clap their fins and lap it up thinking its new and exciting.

I made an implementation of 2048 in Python 3, with a choice of four different user interfaces (likely to add more), modified the base game and one UI to run on Python 2.2 (because that's the latest version to run on Mac OS 9). Haven't paid a krona so far, though I have no idea how much time I've spent on it - the first git commit was done on June 30.

Then again. It's no the most complicated game ever. And I didn't create the game mechanics, since it's just an implementation of an existing game.

Unity3d Here - Must agree to the terms ENGINE

this Make game in unity without CODING

Blender Here - Don't bother with the steam one Models

Paint 3d For 3d textures or even GIMP and all those texture templates you can find online!

also Inkscape Here

Inkscape 0.92.4 for every OS here

https://www.blender.org/download/

isn't unity a piece of sh!t not worth it's salt in fact I'll go and throw it into this cave that was made using unity 2019.3 beta render of cave

Here's an article with some interesting statistics. Itt may not cover your needs, but cuold be worth checking out.

very interesting statistics indeed! In the end it looks like the tendency of reveiling productiions cost and having the media talking about it is more of a thing of blockbuster movies.

It covers my needs but besides that its also a great article. It almost reads like a scientific paper of sorts. The only criticism I have is that it threats countries/continents as monoliths/singular entities and that it doesn't involve demographics and avg purchasing power as per capita, which is important to have since you can compare parts of the population and their interests with video games more objectively and descriptively, and from that you can also further derive information from.

Just as an example, it nowhere does explain it that the average japanese person still spends significantly more than the average american person when it comes to video games even though it is vastly implied within the article. This implied statement is just a simple oversight.