Half?

Modern studios barely have permanent staff to begin with anymore. It's just a revolving door of contractors led by a small team of "permanent" employees, desperately holding the direction of the project together...

Whom the execs will inevitably think are easy to replace, fire, and do a surprised pickahu face when they then set up a new indie studio and start outselling them at a fraction of the budget.

To be fair, a lot of recent games have not been as good as games like the original Tomb Raider.

Teams were making generational masterpieces with shoestring budgets and like, 50 dudes or less in a random business office corner in under 3 years.

These days massive 500+ people studios are taking 5+ years with a budget of hundreds of millions just to drop games like Halo Infinite? Concord? Highguard? I mean sure, not every modern game is that bad, but these modern failures still caused monumental financial loss compared to what bad games back in the day might cost the studio and investors.

I just think the teams are way too big, and the budgets are also way too big. More people and more money doesn't equal a better game.

The opposite of minted

Not having much dosh.

The other answers weren't that helpful.

It means living off the bones of your arse

as funny as the other replies are, it's just a way to say you're dirt poor, often used to describe a temporary personal financial state, rather than used when talking about groups of people or the like. it's British lingo.

Lacking wonga