^^ Dear lord. 100K/year. Dev cost. That includes taxes, administration, building costs, equipment, software licenses...

Are you guys honestly clueless enough to think that each employee gets paid 100K per year in salary, and that's all that dev costs account for?

No.... that's what you said.

We thought you were rightly being stupid.

Yeah and SMG was in development for at least 4 years (really more like 8) with a massive team and one of the most famous (expensive)  individual developers in the world. And it cost 15 mill or so. Do you really think I am stupid enough to think that The Conduit, a game that didn't even have a publisher for a year, with a team a fraction of the size, and half the development time (or less)  cost half that much? Seriously man?

100K/employee/year is the standard for dev cost calculations.  That's what I said.  You should read before jumping to foolish conclusions.

No you said 100K/Employee/A year is standard.

100k Per employee per Year.

If you meant something else you phrased it poorly.

More likely you meant that and are now trying to back your way out of it... like you've been doing the entire thread.

@Groucho what was the per developer cost from say 5 years ago in the middle of the PS2 generation? Im curious as to how the costs for the exact same projects may have scaled over time.

100K per developer is the figure I have seen on multiple occassions for U.S development from a couple of other developers on www.beyond3d.com/forum

Ambition and raw cost are totally unrelated. What on earth does ambition have to do with cost?!?!

Some of the most ambitious projects are created on shoestring budgets. They are ambitious because that shoestring is someone's entire life savings. Some indie film maker pouring every cent they own into a project, has far more ambition than some bigwig choosing which scripts deserve $50 million and which deserve $100 million.

Ambition is taking a higher risk, for the potential of a higher reward. The Blair Witch Project was more ambitious than Hancock.

Basing an entire game on a student contest winner like De Blob, is far more ambitious than a follow-the-leader project like Kane and Lynch or Saint's Row, which probably had higher budgets, especially for advertising.

In reality, investment is proportionate to expected return. Publishers make an investment expecting a certain rate of return. If the expected return goes up, they'll make a higher investment. If it goes down, they'll cut corners. To the extent that actual return is a function of the size of the investment, this creates self-fulfilling prophesies. But if everything had returns proportionate to the investment, there would be no "flops" or "break-out hits."

I do think that Groucho is right to an extent, that EA is probably talking not just about lower art asset costs, but different types of projects.

However, the ability for different types of projects to succeed on Wii is not a negative.

Games like Dead Space, Sonic and the Black Knight and Monster Hunter 3 are all coming to Wii at least partly because of lower dev costs.

According to VGC numbers, Sonic Unleashed has sold more on PS360 combined, but only Wii ever gets exclusive Sonic games. That's because if your expected dollar sales are the same regardless of platform, Wii costs less.

And console developers are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to having a break-out hit on the HD systems. Traditional PC devs, like Valve, Bethesda and Epic, have established practices for turning profits making huge-scale games on a high-piracy platform. With low piracy on home consoles, they take in huge margins, and additional investments increase the quality of the game beyond what traditional console developers are yet able to produce.

So Wii's advantages are really two-fold. For a similar type of game, Wii's cost may not be just 1/3rd of an HD game. However, there is a higher potential for a "break-out hit" with a traditional console game instead of a traditional PC game.

Or you could say people made an incorrect assumption?

Not at all.  If the intent isn't what was meant and most people got it wrong, the fault lies in the writing.

 If that is what he would of meant.  There would of been a good way to phrase it, rather then to say 100K per developer per year.

Thats not always the case, Hitler said exactly what he intended to do in his book. So the fault in that case was in the reading.

"100k per developer per year." Thats pretty much straight forward if you read it exactly as is said. 100k per developer... Since this is a games sales site, a degree of industry knowledge is expected from readers and if they aren't up with the play then they probably shouldn't be posting in a thread about game budgets now should they?