| Procrastinato said: SMG was made by Nintendo EAD Tokyo, and it was their only project during its duration. SMG duration: 2.5 years (source: Yoshiaki Koizumi, director, SMG. EDGE Online post-mortem. http://www.edge-online.com/features/post-mortem-super-mario-galaxy?page=0,0) EAD Tokyo size: 65 (source: IGN database, http://games.ign.com/objects/762/762797.html) Average cost to develop a game, per dev, per year (survey sometime before 2005, Gamasutra... find the link yourself, since I'm too lazy): $100K
Then of course, there's that "math" thing, which people love to question. 2.5 x 65 x 100K = 16.25 million, at a minimum. Oh unless you think the best of the best, i.e. Nintendo, costs less than average. There's an actual quote somewhere from a Nintendo source (it may have even been Miyamoto), stating this number almost exactly. I can't find it at the moment though, and I'm tired of searching for it. If anyone honestly doubts the math, and really want to pretend SMG just rolled off some generic cheap assembly line... feel free (not referring to you noname2000... you're being decent) to disprove the math here, or find the quote and show me that I misread it, since this, and it, represents a hell of a lot more than some ridiculous "Wii development is cheepz" fantasy being cooked up here, and in many foolhardy threads of the past on these boards. |
The numbers check out. The only part I'd quibble with is the assumption that all 65 employees were always working on the game, even during pre-production (Nintendo teams tend to cross-pollinate with other teams a lot, especially when they're not needed in their own team) and that the figure exclude important outside costs, such as the orchestrated music (which can't have come cheap). I was hoping you had the quote from the Nintendo employee, since I heard such a quote existed, but I've never actually read it, and I've heard different figures attributed to him/her.
