The post has been translated automatically. Original language: Russian
Games today are global. The launch of Resident Evil or Baldur’s Gate 3 sparks conversations in Berlin, Bangkok, and Buenos Aires at the same time. Tutorials for ZBrush and Blender are available anywhere with an internet connection. Graphics cards cost the same in the U.S. as they do in India. In such a unified landscape, you might expect the labor market to have evened out by now: if you can create high-quality assets for Unreal, surely your work should be worth the same everywhere.
But it isn’t. A 3D artist in Bangkok might charge $10 an hour and feel lucky to have steady contracts, while another in Berlin charges €80 and still has no shortage of clients. This isn’t a market failure. It’s how the system is designed to function.
Defining a “Fair” Rate
The disparity is most obvious in freelance work. Take this scenario: a young artist in Europe sets their hourly rate at $25—similar to colleagues in Asia. Clients jump at the bargain, but the freelancer community reacts differently: “You’re undercutting the market.” When that artist raises their rate to €50–70, the flow of work doesn’t dry up—it simply shifts. Instead of clients from developing regions, the artist now attracts studios in London or Los Angeles, where that pay scale feels normal.
The opposite dynamic happens too. An artist in Southeast Asia may spend years charging $15–20 an hour locally. But once they start working directly with European studios, build a stronger portfolio, and polish their communication skills, they can move into the €40-and-up range.
Stories like these show there is no universal “fair rate.” Pricing depends not only on where you live, but on which market you’re selling your labor into. If you can position yourself inside a higher-value circle of trust—through language, culture, legal infrastructure, and reputation—your rates can climb to match.
When Location Costs More Than Assets
Individual rates scale up into the budgets of entire games. The case of PlayStation’s Concord illustrates this well. Rumors placed the project’s budget in the hundreds of millions. Those numbers are debatable, but the reasoning behind them made sense: the team was based in the Seattle area, one of the most expensive places in the U.S. There, a programmer or technical artist isn’t just competing with Bungie or 343 Industries, but with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Salaries are high by default. A developer with a Seattle mortgage and kids in local schools simply cannot work for $25 an hour—a rate that might be reasonable for an artist in Manila or Minsk, but in the Pacific Northwest would mean living below the poverty line.
That geographic reality alone can double or triple a game’s budget. Two identical assets—a building model and a texture set—might cost vastly different sums depending on whether they’re created in Seattle, Warsaw, or Pune.
This pattern repeats again and again. Back in the 2010s, many were puzzled why Ubisoft kept opening studios not in Paris or Montreal but in Bucharest or Odessa. The answer is straightforward: if you’re producing the same brick wall for Assassin’s Creed, the wall from Bucharest costs the company three times less than the one from Canada. And in high-volume pipelines like environments or background NPCs, that arithmetic saves millions.
But there are counterexamples. A former EA employee recalled that part of Need for Speed’s assets came from contractors in Eastern Europe. In the end, they had to be reworked in Vancouver because of countless issues with technical requirements and integration. Suddenly, the cheap asset became expensive—because it was being fixed by senior developers earning $120,000 a year.
So it’s not just about “cheap vs. expensive.” Sometimes paying more upfront is the smarter move, if it means getting assets that fit smoothly into the pipeline. That’s why studios like Naughty Dog and Rockstar still keep large teams in costly markets. They’re paying not only for the work itself but for the assurance that production will run smoothly—without endless cross-ocean revisions.
There are even more dramatic examples. In the mid-2010s, several small U.S. studios admitted they literally “saved themselves” by moving part of their teams to Eastern Europe. In the U.S., they couldn’t afford to keep dozens of staff between projects — rent and healthcare drained the budget. After relocating to Warsaw or Kyiv, the exact same team cost half as much. It didn’t make the work easier, but it gave the studio a chance to survive. For major publishers, that math translates into billions. For indies, it can be the difference between survival and collapse.
Here lies the paradox. Games are global — you can build a team across five countries. But economically, studios remain tied to geography: the office’s location dictates salaries, which in turn dictate the game’s budget. And the fact that assets might, in theory, cost the same everywhere becomes irrelevant.
Regional Pricing: Games and Labor
Wages in game development resemble Steam’s regional pricing policy in surprising ways. Officially, a game costs $60. But in Turkey, Argentina, or India, the price may be two or three times lower. Valve’s explanation is simple: otherwise, no one would buy it. Average salaries and living costs in those countries are different, and selling at a “global price” would be pointless.
Labor follows the same logic. For an artist or programmer, an hourly rate is shaped by local expenses, taxes, and living standards. In California, with rent at $2,500 and health insurance at $600 a month, a specialist simply can’t charge less than $60–70 an hour—they wouldn’t survive. In Poland or the Philippines, someone with the same skills and portfolio can live comfortably at $20–25 an hour.
But for studios, the regional base rate isn’t the only factor — alternatives matter too. An artist in Latin America might say: “I’ll charge $35 an hour, because at $20 it makes more sense for me to work locally than spend time negotiating in English.” Conversely, in countries with high youth unemployment, people may accept below-market rates just to gain experience on a recognizable project.
It’s almost identical to regional game pricing: the rate for an hour of work isn’t an objective value but a balance between what employers are willing to pay and what workers need to cover their lives.
The imbalances can be striking. One Serbian artist said he was earning $30 an hour working for a U.S. studio. That was three times the local average salary, while for the client it was still cheaper than hiring an American at $70. Both sides were happy. But for a Californian artist, the same $30 rate would be impossible: it wouldn’t even cover rent.
This shapes the strategies of major publishers too. Ubisoft, EA, and CD Projekt don’t just open offices in new regions for talent pools — they do it for price balance. Ubisoft Pune, Ubisoft Kyiv, and EA Romania exist largely because these regions allow them to maintain large teams more cheaply without breaking the pipeline. It’s essentially a corporate version of regional pricing: the game sells at the same price in stores, but production costs a fraction thanks to geography.
Here’s the paradox: the product is global, but labor is local. Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty launches worldwide on the same day, and players in Berlin and Buenos Aires get the same content. But inside the budget, thousands of rows in Excel are tied to local realities—from office rent to tax laws. So when we hear that “a new AAA game costs $300 million,” that number includes not just graphics and technology but also the regional price of labor.