Articles Star Citizen

Today, developing video games is an incredibly labor-intensive and extremely costly process. Of course, there are indie projects still made by just a handful of people, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, developed by relatively small teams. However, the creation of ambitious AAA releases with cutting-edge graphics has long been comparable to the production of the most expensive movies. To give you an idea of the scale of these budgets, we've compiled a list of games with truly astronomical production costs.

The most demanding PC games aren't poorly optimized games — they're projects that honestly load powerful hardware in the name of real technology and real visuals. The difference is fundamental, and this top sticks to it strictly. A demanding game taxes a top-tier graphics card and CPU because it's showing off expensive tech: path tracing and full ray tracing, Nanite and Lumen on Unreal Engine 5, dense world simulation, the streaming of vast open spaces with no loading screens. For every frame it spends, it pays you back in a picture you can actually see — on a flagship system these projects work as a showcase of what a PC can do, and they're also the best-looking games around right now. Crysis once set the bar, and "but can it run it?" became a meme for years. Today there are dozens of such games. As for the ones that drop frames equally on any hardware and give you neither photorealism nor a wow factor in return — that's not about being demanding, that's about bad optimization, and we've got a separate top of the most optimized games for them.