Why gaming's profitability records are found in small productions

Two ways to measure a success

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was released in October 2023. By the summer of 2026 it had passed 18.2 million copies and $1.2 billion in revenue, 73 % above the sales target its studio had set itself. Its budget is also known, which is rare: $315 million including development and marketing, according to internal Insomniac Games presentations made public at the end of 2023. The same documents give the return on investment the studio was aiming for, 35 %.

Measured against its budget, that very large success returns a little under four times the outlay. Rank games not by the amount they collected but by the number of times they returned their budget, and Spider-Man 2 sits neither at the top nor in the first third. The records belong to games whose budgets almost nobody knows, because they are counted in tens of thousands of dollars.

The same game can lead one ranking and vanish from the other, depending on the question asked.

Why the return on a large production is capped

The multiple is a ratio, and its two terms move in opposite directions. The denominator has changed scale: a few million dollars in the early 2000s, $50 to $150 million in 2018 according to the British competition authority, $200 to $300 million today. Within a single franchise, the development cost of a Call of Duty went from more than $450 million in 2015 to more than $700 million in 2020. Marketing comes on top, at a third to 85 % of the development cost.

Sources: British competition authority, Omdia, Bloomberg.

The numerator is capped by the size of the market: only a handful of titles clear 30 million copies. The other recent major successes therefore show the same order of return. Cyberpunk 2077, with 40 million copies and around $1.2 billion in net revenue for an officially disclosed budget of $316 million, returns a little under four times the outlay. Black Ops Cold War, $700 million in development for 30 million copies, returns about twice.

The Spider-Man licence sums up the mechanism on its own. Miles Morales, budgeted at $156 million, delivered a 122 % return on investment. Spider-Man 2, at $315 million, was aiming for 35 %. The third instalment, costed at $385 million in the same documents, is counting on 75 %. The cheapest of the three is the one that returned the most.

PEAK, the other end of the scale

In February 2025, two independent studios, Aggro Crab and Landfall, brought seven people together in Seoul for a one-month game jam. Out of it came PEAK, a co-operative climbing game sold at $7.99 and published on Steam on 16 June 2025. Nick Kaman, director of Aggro Crab, put a public figure on the bill: less than $200,000 for the two studios combined.

“It was mainly just a couple months salaries and the Airbnb, flights, and food for Korea.”

Nick Kaman, Aggro Crab, in Game Developer, June 2025

The game broke even within hours of launch: one million copies in six days, more than 10 million by August, 11 million by late October 2025, for gross revenue estimated between $71 and $92 million. On the lower bound of that range, the multiple comes out at 360 times the outlay.

For Spider-Man 2 to reach the same return, it would have had to generate more than $110 billion, roughly half the annual revenue of the global video game industry. That return is not hard for a large production to reach: it is arithmetically out of its reach.

Not an isolated case

Lower bounds used. Green Hell is the only one whose budget and revenue are both published.

Green Hell is the only case in the ranking whose two terms are both put in figures by the studio. Creepy Jar, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, announced 3.5 million zlotys of production and marketing up to the early access release, and its annual accounts show 248.7 million zlotys of cumulative revenue between 2018 and 2025. That is about 71 times the outlay, bearing in mind that seven years of additional content and ports were funded after the production figure.

Undertale offers the most rigorous calculation, its budget being known to the dollar: $51,124 raised on Kickstarter in 2013, for more than five million copies. Vampire Survivors holds the frugality record, with around £1,100 spent on assets and music, and more than 27 million players. Stardew Valley took Eric Barone four and a half years, alone and with no production budget, to pass 50 million copies in early 2026.

The most recent case is also the most extreme: Meccha Chameleon, two people, two months of development on free assets, sold at $5.99, released on 10 June 2026 and past 15 million copies a month later. The historical benchmark remains Minecraft, developed alone and in the evenings: in April 2011, still in beta, it already had 1.8 million paying customers and $33 million in revenue.

Three mechanical reasons for the gap

Each point plots a game's estimated revenue against the budget that produced it.

The first mechanism is arithmetic: at equal revenue, dividing the budget by ten multiplies the return by ten. The second comes down to price, a small budget allowing a low price that widens the reachable audience. Nick Kaman sums up PEAK's trade-off with a useful line: eight dollars is still five dollars in a player's mind, it does not become ten. The third comes down to time, since capital paid back within the first hours of release does not return the same as capital tied up for five to seven years.

A market that increasingly rewards these productions

Official figures confirm that this economy is in good health. At GDC in March 2026, Valve stated that 5,863 titles had passed $100,000 in revenue on Steam in 2025, against around 3,000 in 2020. The three best-selling new releases of the year by volume are also games priced under $20: R.E.P.O., PEAK and Schedule I.

What the multiple says, and what it does not

A high multiple measures a return, not an amount. Insomniac Games created far more value in absolute terms with Spider-Man 2 than PEAK's seven people ever will. The two logics simply sit badly together in a single project: beyond a certain budget, the return is capped by the size of the market whatever the quality of the game, and below it, there is practically no upper limit.

A note on method

Development budgets are rarely published: outside CD Projekt, the figures cited here come from internal documents, court filings or analyst estimates. Revenues are expressed as consumer spending, with one exception: Cyberpunk 2077's is the net revenue published by CD Projekt, a narrower basis that understates its multiple. Steam revenues without an official announcement are estimated from review counts, and the lower bound of each range has been used. All the multiples in this article are orders of magnitude.

Sources

Game World Observer, budgets and return targets for Insomniac's Spider-Man games, December 2023: https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/12/19/playstation-pc-game-sales-leak-insomniac-budgets-roi

TweakTown, cumulative sales and revenue for Marvel's Spider-Man 2 per Alinea Analytics, August 2026: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/113078/spider-man-brand-new-day-helps-boost-sales-for-marvels-spider-man-2-revenue-climbs-past-dollars1-2b/index.html

CD Projekt, first half 2026 results: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-red-wraps-up-the-first-half-of-2026/

PC Gamer, Call of Duty budgets revealed by a court declaration, January 2025: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/call-of-duty/call-of-dutys-development-budget-ballooned-by-usd250-million-between-2015-and-2020-to-an-eye-watering-usd700-million/

Kotaku, average large-production budgets from the CMA report, May 2023: https://kotaku.com/microsoft-activision-blizzard-call-duty-gta-vi-halo-1850391113

Game Developer, how PEAK reached two million sales for less than $200,000, June 2025: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/how-co-op-climbing-hit-peak-achieved-2-million-sales-for-less-than-200-000-

GamesRadar, PEAK at eleven million copies, October 2025: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/co-op/after-a-few-months-of-work-led-to-11-million-copies-sold-on-steam-peak-devs-embrace-what-many-companies-refuse-to-learn-were-not-going-to-continually-have-a-graph-go-up/

PC Gamer, Meccha Chameleon, July 2026: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sports/based-on-meccha-chameleons-incredibly-short-2-month-dev-cycle-its-creators-have-already-earned-usd1-million-per-day-of-work/

Money.pl, Green Hell production and marketing cost announced by Creepy Jar, October 2018: https://www.money.pl/gielda/wiadomosci/artykul/creepy-jar-koszty-gry-green-hell-zwrocily,95,0,2418271.html

Bankier, Creepy Jar full-year 2025 results: https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/Creepy-Jar-w-2025-r-mial-17-2-mln-zl-zysku-netto-i-15-9-mln-zl-EBIT-9122050.html

Kickstarter, the Undertale campaign, 2013: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1002143342/undertale

The Game Business, Vampire Survivors and its creator's fortune, April 2026: https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/the-vampire-survivors-developer-is

Game Developer, Stardew Valley past 41 million copies: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/stardew-valley-sales-grew-to-over-41-million-by-2024-s-end

Game Developer, Minecraft at $33 million in revenue and 1.8 million paying customers, April 2011: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-i-minecraft-i-draws-over-33-million-in-revenue-from-1-8m-paying-customers

Game Developer, Valve says 5,863 titles earned over $100,000 on Steam in 2025: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/valve-says-5-836-titles-earned-over-100-000-on-steam-in-2025