# Claude Opus vs Sonnet vs Haiku: What It Really Costs to Build a Game > Source: > Published: 2026-10-10 00:00:00+00:00 # Claude Opus vs Sonnet vs Haiku: What It Really Costs to Build a Game A creator built the same AI game three times with Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus 5.5. Here's what each model tier actually cost and delivered. ## How much does it cost to build a game with Claude AI models? One developer’s benchmark put the same game concept, an Attack on Titan style 3D multiplayer prototype, through three tiers of Anthropic’s Claude models. Haiku 5.5 produced a workable version for about $5. Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 both landed in the $24 to $25 range for the initial build. The gap in price between the two higher tiers was smaller than expected, but the gap in output quality between Haiku and the other two was noticeable. ## TL;DR - A developer benchmarked **three Claude model tiers** (Haiku 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Opus 5.5) by giving each the same prompt to build an Attack on Titan inspired 3D game. - **Haiku 5.5 cost around $5** and produced a playable game with shadows and animations, though rougher around the edges, including a bug where falling from cliffs drains health unexpectedly. - **Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 both cost roughly $24 to $25** , landing much closer together in price than the jump from Haiku would suggest. - The initial AI-generated build was treated as a **starting seed** , not a finished product. The real work happened in a follow-up pass that turned the single-player prototype into a multiplayer game. - The developer used **Claude Code running Opus 5.5** inside a terminal environment, paired with**voice transcription** to describe desired mechanics faster than typing. - Iteration relied on **actually playing the game** and narrating fixes in real time rather than writing an exhaustive spec upfront, since the model could implement most of the design work directly. - Cost scales with the complexity of the ask: a single-player seed ran $5 to $25, but a fully fleshed out multiplayer system with character selection, combat balancing, and bot support represents meaningfully more compute and iteration than the baseline figures cover. ## What did the $5 to $25 range actually buy? The three model tiers weren’t just graded on price. They produced visibly different games from the same creative brief. Haiku 5.5, the cheapest and fastest tier, generated a game the developer called “workable.” It included shadow rendering and animation work that held up reasonably well for the cost. It also shipped with a design flaw: falling from a large cliff cost the player health in a way that felt more like a bug than an intentional mechanic. For $5, that’s a tradeoff most builders would accept for a first draft. Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 produced noticeably stronger results, and interestingly priced almost identically to each other at $24 to $25. That’s a meaningful data point for anyone assuming Opus, generally positioned as Anthropic’s most capable and most expensive model, would cost dramatically more than Sonnet for the same task. In this test, it didn’t. The quality bar between the three tiers was clear enough that the developer picked the Opus version as the foundation for everything that followed, turning it from a single-player tech demo into a persistent multiplayer game. ## Why does Haiku cost so much less than Sonnet or Opus? Anthropic prices its Claude models in tiers based on capability and compute cost per token, with Haiku positioned as the fastest and cheapest option, Sonnet as the mid-tier balance of speed and intelligence, and Opus as the top-end model for the hardest reasoning and generation tasks. Building a game from a text prompt means generating a large volume of code, asset logic, and game-loop structure in a single extended session, so the per-token price difference between tiers compounds quickly over a long generation run. That’s consistent with what played out here: Haiku’s cheaper per-token rate produced a smaller total bill, but also a rougher result. Sonnet and Opus, despite being different models with different intended use cases, ended up close in total cost for this particular job, which suggests the task length and complexity (not just the per-token rate) was the dominant cost driver once you’re above the Haiku tier. ## Is the initial game cost the real cost of the project? No, and this is the part worth paying attention to if you’re estimating your own AI coding budget. The $5 to $25 figures cover only the first generation pass, what the developer called the “nugget” or “seed.” That got them a single-player prototype with core mechanics (movement, a grappling/swinging system, basic enemies) but nothing resembling a finished game. Turning that seed into an online multiplayer experience required a second, much more involved phase: running Claude Code with Opus 5.5 in a terminal environment, issuing a long, detailed voice-transcribed brief covering faction selection, Titan variety, respawn pacing, fuel mechanics, and character selection, then repeatedly playing the result and feeding back specific fixes. That loop, playtesting, narrating problems, re-prompting, repeated over many iterations, is where the bulk of the actual build time and compute spend happens. No total figure for that phase was given, but the structure makes clear it dwarfs the initial $5 to $25 in both time and likely cost. ## How do you actually prompt an AI model to build a game? The workflow demonstrated here leaned on two things: voice input and iterative playtesting instead of exhaustive upfront specs. Instead of typing a design document, the developer used voice transcription to describe the game verbally, citing a rough estimate of 200 words per minute by voice versus 40 to 80 words per minute typing. The initial prompt covered faction choice (playable Titans versus Survey Corps-style human characters), a request for Titans to feel powerful rather than like slow obstacles, fuel-drop mechanics to extend the grappling system, a kill/death scoreboard, escalating respawn timers inspired by League of Legends, and bot support when player counts were uneven. From there, the loop became: play the build, notice what feels wrong, describe the fix by voice, repeat. Specific examples included removing a build mode that didn’t fit the game’s tone, adding fall damage and a braking mechanic so players couldn’t grapple into walls at full speed without consequence, and adding infrastructure for picking named characters from the source material. The developer’s own framing was that it’s no longer necessary to write a complete design document before starting, since the model can absorb mechanical changes through conversation instead. ## Is it worth paying for Opus over cheaper tiers? Based on this one comparison, the case for Opus isn’t about raw price since it landed close to Sonnet’s cost. The case is about output quality and reliability over a long, multi-turn build process. If a project is a quick prototype or a one-off experiment, Haiku’s roughly $5 price point and “workable” output may be entirely sufficient. If the goal is a polished result that you intend to keep building on through many rounds of feedback, as in this case where the prototype became the base for a full multiplayer system, the higher-tier models’ stronger first draft reduces the amount of rework needed later. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How much does it cost to build a simple game with Claude AI? In this benchmark, a single-player game prototype cost about $5 using Claude Haiku 5.5, and about $24 to $25 using either Claude Sonnet 5.5 or Opus 5.5 for the same prompt. ### Is Opus 5.5 much more expensive than Sonnet 5.5? Not necessarily for every task. In this test, the two models produced nearly identical total costs ($24 to $25) for generating the same game, despite Opus generally being positioned as the more capable, higher-cost tier. ### Does the initial cost include the full game, or just a prototype? Just a prototype. The $5 to $25 figures covered only the first single-player generation. Turning that into a full multiplayer game with faction selection, bots, and balanced combat required a separate, more extensive round of development that wasn’t priced in the benchmark. ### What tools were used to build and iterate on the game? ## Plans first. *Then code.* Remy writes the spec, manages the build, and ships the app. The developer used Claude Code running Opus 5.5 inside a terminal environment, combined with a voice transcription tool to describe desired features and mechanics faster than typing them out. ### Do you need a full game design document before prompting an AI model? Not based on this workflow. The developer skipped a detailed upfront spec in favor of a rough voice-described brief, then refined the game through repeated playtesting and follow-up prompts describing specific issues as they came up.