Send the same brief to several educational game studios, and the quotes can range from $30,000 to $280,000. This means “educational game” can describe very different products, from a reskinned quiz to a validated simulation with a research partner.
As game-based learning grows, more vendors are chasing the same briefs with different models and pricing. This guide explains what drives costs, how studios structure deals, and how 8 best educational game development companies compare based on verifiable credentials.
Why two quotes for the same learning game differ by 10x
Several factors drive the cost of an educational game, not just the studio’s rate: who owns the learning objectives, how much content each mechanic supports, the art style, the platform and device requirements, integrations such as SSO or LMS reporting, and post-launch support.
If you bring clear objectives, an assessment plan, and subject-matter expertise, you’re mainly buying production. If the studio has to define those, you are also buying senior learning consultancy. Public pricing is limited, so use visible anchors where possible. Whimsy Games, for example, lists an hourly rate of $25-$49 and a $10,000 minimum project size on Clutch.
4 ways educational game development companies price the work
Studios usually price educational game projects in different ways.
- Fixed-scope works when the design is signed off, and the deadline is fixed, such as a school year or a conference launch. It becomes difficult when discovery is still open because every change has to be renegotiated.
- A dedicated team or time-and-materials works when the product will continue to evolve or when a pilot may become a platform. It requires someone on your side to own the backlog.
- License and customize is the fastest and cheapest route if existing content fits your needs. Attensi and Game Strategies use this model. The trade-off is ownership: you’re renting a product.
- Co-development fits teams that already have a product but need help with a specific discipline, such as art, QA, or engineering. It can unblock delivery without restarting the project.
The list of the best educational game development companies
This shortlist covers 8 best educational game development companies: Whimsy Games for full-cycle Unity production, Schell Games for large-scale educational and VR projects, Kuato Studios for children’s learning games with licensed IP, IJsfontein for playful learning in schools, museums, and healthcare, E-Line Media for impact games built through partnerships, Attensi for gamified workplace simulations, Game Strategies, formerly Gamelearn, for licensable corporate learning games and authoring tools, and Riseup Labs for government and NGO edtech in emerging markets.
| Company | Pricing model | Team size | Verified credential | Typical project |
| Whimsy Games | Hourly, from $25 to $49, minimum $10,000 | 75+ specialists | Clutch and GoodFirms profiles, 100+ mobile titles | Custom educational or gamified build on Unity |
| Schell Games | Project-based, premium | 120+ staff | Largest education and entertainment studio in the US | Flagship VR or classroom title with a named brand |
| Kuato Studios | Product and licensing partnerships | About 32 staff | $6M Series A led by Horizons Ventures | Kids’ literacy or coding app, often with licensed IP |
| IJsfontein | Project-based | 40+ staff | BAFTA-winning debut title, active since 1997 | School curriculum tool, museum exhibit, staff training |
| E-Line Media | Grant, partnership, and commercial blends | 45+ staff | BAFTA Best Debut and a Peabody Award for Never Alone | Mission-led title with an institutional partner |
| Attensi | Platform subscription | 74+ staff | $25M growth round, 2025, plus Fosway and TIME listings | Workplace simulation rolled out across sites |
| Game Strategies (Gamelearn) | Catalog license plus authoring tool | 50-170 people | International Serious Play gold and a Stevie Award | Soft-skills training live in weeks, not months |
| Riseup Labs | Fixed-scope public tenders | 270+ people | ISO 9001:2015, UNICEF long-term agreement partner | Learning app for low-end Android at national scale |
Whimsy Games: The pick when the content exists and the build doesn’t
Whimsy Games is a Unity-first studio, and one of the best educational game development companies for buyers who already have subject-matter expertise and need production rather than pedagogy consulting. Its Clutch profile lists 100+ mobile titles across casual, mid-core, and educational genres, with support for iOS, Android, PC, and PlayStation. It also lists an hourly rate of $25-$49 and a minimum project size of $10,000.
Its educational work covers STEM, financial literacy through decision-based scenarios, language learning built on repetition and progression, wellbeing titles developed with client-side specialists, and gamification layers for existing processes. Published GoodFirms reviews mention an educational game with an AI assistant for simplifying complex material and a gamified rewards and progress-tracking system credited with improving staff engagement and retention.
The main reason to choose Whimsy is cost-efficient production. At its rate band, discovery, art, engineering, QA, and live operations cost less per hour than many Western studios charge for engineering alone. The studio offers full-cycle delivery, co-development, and dedicated teams, so the setup can change as a pilot grows into a product.
- Typical engagement: full-cycle build or dedicated team, priced hourly with a defined first milestone.
Schell Games: The premium American option when the title has to carry a brand
Founded in Pittsburgh in 2002 by Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design, Schell Games has 120+ employees and describes itself as the largest full-service education and entertainment game developer in the United States.
Its education work comes alongside VR and location-based entertainment. This matters because the same team behind the VR chemistry lab HoloLAB Champions also ships commercial VR titles. Client work has included Disney, Microsoft, Yale University, PBS, and Fred Rogers Productions.
Schell is a strong fit for branded projects, institutional funders, hardware partners, and large-scale classroom or VR products. It isn’t the right choice for a small budget. Expect premium pricing and ask early whether your budget clears their minimum.
The studio has also grown steadily since 2002 without any layoffs, which matters for projects that span several years and require team continuity.
- Typical engagement: fixed-scope flagship production with a defined release window.
Kuato Studios: A product company that builds learning games
Kuato Studios is a London-based company founded in 2011. It raised a Series A round of about $6 million, led by Horizons Ventures, and has a team of ~32 people.
Its early titles taught JavaScript through robot combat, while Dino Tales and Safari Tales turned creative play into literacy practice by generating a storybook for parents at the end of each session.
The studio has built learning products around licensed entertainment IP from partners including Disney, Marvel, and DreamWorks. It also adds progress analytics for parents and teachers. This makes Kuato a strong fit for consumer learning apps that need recognizable characters to attract users. It is a weaker fit for curriculum-aligned classroom tools.
- Typical engagement: co-production or licensing partnership.
IJsfontein: Nearly 3 decades of playful learning
IJsfontein is an Amsterdam-based educational game studio founded in 1997. Its debut educational adventure, Masters of the Elements, was published in 5 languages and won a BAFTA in 1999. Today, the studio has more than 40 people, including concept directors, designers, and programmers.
IJsfontein works across primary education, museum installations, medical staff training, and behavior-change programs. These clients have different needs, but they all require complex content to become clear, engaging, and usable.
It is a strong fit for European education, healthcare, museum, or public-sector projects where the concept needs to be carefully shaped before production begins. It is a weaker fit for buyers looking for offshore rates.
The concept phase is the practical advantage. Projects like this often depend on whether the first few weeks produce a strong, defensible idea. IJsfontein treats concept as a discipline, and buyers should expect it to be quoted and paid for separately.
- Typical engagement: project-based build with a separately quoted concept phase.
E-Line Media: The partnership specialist, when money comes from more than one place
E-Line Media is a Phoenix-based studio founded in 2008. It builds games with institutional and community partners.
Its best-known project is Never Alone, co-produced with Alaska’s Cook Inlet Tribal Council and created with more than 30 Iñupiaq elders, writers, and community members. The game won a BAFTA for Best Debut Game and later a Peabody Award for digital and interactive storytelling. The tribal council reinvested its revenue share and became a major shareholder in the studio.
E-Line has also worked with the Smithsonian, the BBC, OceanX, Google, USAID, DARPA, and the National Science Foundation. Its strength is managing projects that combine grant funding, research partners, community input, and commercial goals.
- Typical engagement: multi-party production with blended grant and commercial funding.
Attensi: Buy the platform, not the build
Attensi sells gamified 3D workplace simulations, with analytics tied to business KPIs. It raised more than $25 million in non-dilutive growth funding in 2025 and has offices in Oslo, London, Boston, Cologne, and Gothenburg. Clients include Circle K, KPMG, Hiscox, Boehringer Ingelheim, YMCA, and London Business School.
In 2025, the company appeared on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list and TIME’s ranking of top edtech companies. It was also named a Strategic Challenger in the Fosway 9-Grid for digital learning.
Attensi is a strong fit for large employers with repeatable training needs across many sites. In that case, a platform model is faster and cheaper than commissioning a custom game. The trade-off is ownership: you are subscribing to a product, not buying an asset, and highly specific content may still require custom work.
Also, Attensi simulations track business metrics, not just completion rates, which helps training teams defend the budget. Since pricing scales by seat count, compare the multi-year subscription cost against a one-time custom build.
- Typical engagement: annual platform subscription with a configured simulation library.
Game Strategies: The fastest route to something live
Game Strategies, formerly Gamelearn, was founded in Spain in 2007 by Ibrahim Jabary, Mai Apraiz, and Eduardo Monfort. Instead of building a services business, it created a catalog of soft-skills training games. Merchants teaches negotiation, Triskelion covers time management, Pacific focuses on team leadership, and later titles address cybersecurity, coaching, and feedback.
The company has credible recognition behind that catalog. Pacific won gold in the corporate category at the 2016 International Serious Play Awards, and Mars won a Stevie Award in 2020.
Since 2020, Game Strategies has also offered an authoring tool that lets clients build their own training games from a library of 3D assets without writing code.
It’s a strong fit for L&D teams with recurring training needs that don’t want to run a full production project. The trade-off is specificity. Catalog games cover general skills, so content tied to your products, regulations, or internal systems still needs to be authored by your team or commissioned separately.
- Typical engagement: catalog license, then in-house authoring for company-specific content.
Riseup Labs: Built for procurement, budgets, and low-end devices
Riseup Labs has operated from Dhaka since 2009 and has a liaison office in New York. It holds ISO 9001:2015 certification and works as a long-term agreement partner of UNICEF Bangladesh.
Its education portfolio includes Meena Game 2 for UNICEF, an augmented reality app about the 1952 Language Movement, and work with the a2i program on the Shikkhok Batayon teachers’ portal, which was nominated as a top five champion project at the WSIS Prizes in 2024. The company also received the Digital Bangladesh Award in 2022.
Riseup Labs can deliver under public-sector tender and reporting requirements, as well as build for low-cost Android devices and unreliable connectivity. This matters in markets where most learners lack access to high-end hardware.
Riseup Labs isn’t the best fit if you are benchmarking against polished consumer edtech products. But for funder-backed programs that need to reach large learner populations on affordable devices, its mix of cost, public-sector experience, and technical practicality is rare.
- Typical engagement: fixed-scope delivery against a tender or funded program.
What to have ready before you ask for a number
Before you brief a studio, prepare 5 things in writing:
- Your learning objectives.
- One measurable outcome that defines success
- The oldest device and slowest connection you must support.
- The deadline and why it matters
- Your position on ownership of source code, art assets, and design documents.
Even rough answers help. A studio that receives this information can provide quotes in days, and the quotes you receive back will be much easier to compare.
Conclusion
The best educational game development companies are those whose business model matches your constraints.
- If you need to launch this quarter and the content is generic, license it through a platform like Attensi or Game Strategies.
- If the content is yours and the constraint is production capacity, buy build hours from a studio like Whimsy Games and keep the learning objectives in-house.
- If the project needs a research partner, public-sector credibility, or community collaboration, look at studios like E-Line Media, IJsfontein, or Riseup Labs.
- If the brief is a premium US flagship or VR project, Schell Games may be the better fit.
Match the model first, and the quotes stop looking arbitrary.
