Kasz216 said:
outlawauron said:
moondeep said:
Everyone's talking about the sales and what's profitable, but I'd like to see an analysis of what's typically required (in man-hours) for a game like Rune Factory. For example, if it takes a team of 20 people (counting 10 programmers, 4 artists, 3 musicians, 2 play-testers, and 1 project lead) about 1 year to develop a game from scratch, then that's roughly 41,600 man-hours (40x52x20). If you figure an average pay rate of $30/hr, then that's around $1.25M for the total labor involved, but without distribution and manufacturing costs. I would think you'd be able to make most smaller niche Wii games for around $1.5M or so. If that's the case, then you'd only need 71,428 copies of the game sold (at a profit of $21 per unit) to break even. Thus, it seems plausible to me that their target was to sell over 75K units. |
Yet I doubt they only had 20 people and the pay can be a great variable.
|
I dunno that's about what LBP had right? With some games it's as easy as setting a system in play and letting the system do the work for you.
Look at Borderlands.
That game had 500,000 guns and E3 08. A later interview plugged it at 650,000 with the addition of alien technology.... and E3 09 they said they lost count... and were now in the millions somewhere.
The problem is.... very few companies work smart.
Well that and it's often hard to get games to work like that. Larely depends how differing it is.
|
I believe LBP had 35-40. You're the team can be small, but I don't hear of many non-indy games with that small of a dev team.
