I’m not sure exactly what use of “expensive” you’re getting at, but my primary point was that it’s more expensive to build the full game than it is to develop a 30 second video of it. I don’t cite actual numbers because this is being done by absolutely monstrous companies with millions of dollars to throw around and smaller companies that only have advertising budgets of 5 or 6 figures. It’s also being done for larger scale games like RPGs and smaller scale games like the water drop puzzle stuff.
But we’re talking about 30 second videos, and building 30 second videos can be done by a single artist within a month, maybe a couple months if we’re being generous. This is like, maybe like a 30k investment. And you can get reasonable data out of like 50k in advertising.
But there’s no way in hell your developing these games on an 80k budget. Most of these games are built by multiple engineers, multiple artists, multiple designers, multiple managers, and multiple marketing people. You can’t pay a single one of them on 80k.
These games generally cost millions and millions to build. A single million dollar ad campaign will give you TONS of data. The other thing is that’s work that has to be done anyway so you don’t lose anything by just doing it first to see if it works before building.
If you have a more specific, question, I’m happy to try to outline something else or give numbers based off my experience. But these happen at many different game scales and it’s just hands down cheaper to do a subset of the work.