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Squilliam on 20 January 2009
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Groucho said:
Squilliam said:
Groucho said:
Squilliam said:

Insomniac -> 200 staff members

Guerilla Games -> 120+ staff members

So really, its Killzone 2 which has taken ages if you consider the sheer number of developers working on it.

 

 

You just supported my statement.  Insomniac has Resistance and R&C in development, in parallel, and they are rumored to be working on a 3rd IP -- 60 employees per project... check.  Guerilla has only recently expanded, and you think they have all their staff on KZ2?  How about KZ3?  You think they will just wait on getting that one started until KZ2 is done?  No new IPs either?  60 employees, average, over the duration of a single project.

Remedy is an independant dev studio.  And yes, they are only working on AW at the moment.  They've stated that more installments for Max Payne are on hold (I can't find the statement atm).

Squilliam, if you don't know any of these details about the games industry, like yes, I do, why do you bother posting this stuff?

Insomniac churns their games out quick time, they probably churn them out too quickly if you consider how badly RFOM 2 is faring com pared to its' competitors.

"Guerilla has only recently expanded, and you think they have all their staff on KZ2?  How about KZ3?  You think they will just wait on getting that one started until KZ2 is done?  No new IPs either?  60 employees, average, over the duration of a single project."

Do you think that maybe the same could apply to remedy as well? Besides this the budget tells us roughly how many developers were working on it on average. $100,000 is the per head average development cost in the United States, so if they have a budget of $30,000,000 thats the equivelent of 300 people working one year or 100 people working for three years. That does not include other I.Ps or anything of the sort.

 

Squill, you dog.  Remedy is in Finland (read: cheap), and dev costs are not the issue here.  Game developers get tired working on the same franchise over 5 years, let alone the same game.  That's the point.  Quality.  Not cost.  And, as I stated, Remedy has stated that AW is their focus.  I sincerely doubt that they have split their small team to work on another IP at the same time -- they are waay behind schedule, and absolutely no publisher will put up with that kind of delay on the return of an investment, without the dev studio putting some serious effort in.

I think AW will be profitable, and will sell very well, even if it is mediocre.  I don't think it will suck, because Remedy, frankly, is awesome.  But 5 years smells bad -- something went wrong, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.  Even good developers make bad decisions.  Look at Free Radical, Factor 5, and Silicon Knights.

I think AW will be fine (just like Haze, Lair, and Too Human were, honestly.  They didn't suck), I just stated initially that I think its fallen into the "oops, we made a huge mistake.. redo" long dev-cycle trap, and that worries me.

 

To be honest, I know nothing of Alan Wake and it's development apart from the fact that A. Its taken a while, and B. Its a survival horror game. I tend to ignore the games which im most interested in, it helps with the wait by not overhyping it. As an example of a small scale developer which tends to take a while, consider Team ICO which releases a game every four years. Regarding this generation, Microsoft has been very good at picking awesome games up from third parties and that combined with Remedy's history I have no trouble in believing that when I finally get to play the game it would likely be worth the wait. Furthermore with Lair, Haze and Too Human there were problems with development early on, they suffered a lot from project management issues which shan't be a problem for Remedy as they have kept development to a smaller scale.

My point about development cost is that you can estimate the number of developers used at least in an American development team and how long the game has been in full swing by the budget. The 100k per developer per year estimate was verified by two independant sources on Beyond3d.com and it matches perfectly to the estimated cost savings by EA for their layoffs.

 



Tease.