What percentage of development costs comes from employee salaries?

[NJ5]

Euphoria14 said:

NJ5 said:

Probably almost all of the cost is salaries and office space/maintenance for each member of a team. Every time we hear about budgets we hear things like "a team with X members". That, and most of the blame for high HD budgets is put on the need for many artists to work on the graphics, artists are employees so...

The stuff like computers and software is not cheap either, but you can reuse it for several projects so...

This is not unique to game developers. Software companies in general spend most of their money on staff, since there are no complex factories to build or anything like that.

 

Thanks.

I was curious because I always see people talking about development costs and how "X" game would cost almost 4x as much if it were developed on PS360 instead of the Wii.

Does that mean dev teams for PS360 are usually 4x as large or do they just get paid less?

 

This would mainly apply to games like Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, etc... Games that release yearly.

 

I wouldn't expect Guitar Hero's development cost to be very different between PS360 and Wii, given that that game doesn't have much in terms of graphics. Call of Duty is another story...

I wouldn't say it's necessarily 4x, but between 2x and 4x from what I've heard (depending on the games, and excluding the crazily expensive games like GTA4).

I just remembered another thing. A big cost is often marketing, which doesn't depend on the team size. That's not really a development cost though.