noname2200 said:
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. |
There are some quotes from Miyamoto stating that the initial dev team on SMG was "much smaller" than the team working on SSBB, at the time (which was around 70-80). EAD Tokyo had not yet grown to its current size, at SMGs beginning, and they didn't need that many to upgrade the SMS engine to be SMGs basis. The number I actually heard was "$16.8 million", although as I said, I cannot find the source. That seems right on track, given that EAD Tokyo was smaller at the start, doing a conversion of SMS, but that the team grew over the dev cycle (as is typical), and that the best-of-the-best that is Nintendo's game dev elite probably cost around 1.5x as much as the "average joe" developer.
You also need to consider that some engine tech from SMS was used, and this saved both time and money. Using Nintendo as an example is a poor method, however -- Nintendo goes to great lengths to make quality games, and pays their top devs very well.
That said, Stranglehold (used by other posters as an example), is also an oddball, in that it reviewed poorly, and is widely known to have been excessive, in terms of development costs and budget overruns -- another bad example.
The Conduit, by the "usual" method of calculations likely cost somewhere between 10-15 million to make -- HVS has 150 employees (source, their website: http://www.high-voltage.com/index.htm), The Conduit was their biggest project (by far), and they posted screenshots as early as April of 2008, which suggests they were near alpha at the time. It took them MUCH longer than 1.75 years to make the Quantum Engine and The Conduit together -- and you cannot discount costs sunk into the engine as not being in the dev cost if you're trying to make a statement about cost-to-develop on a system -- just as quoting Gears/Gears 2 as being "cheap" to develop by Epic cannot discount the scads of work in the Unreal Engine that Epic themselves has invested by this point.
The idea that "Wii" games are cheaper to develop is a fallacy. The truth is that lesser games are cheaper to develop, and if you want quality, you must spend. I doubt that developing quality games, with the tech limitations of the Wii in mind, costs as much as developing a quality HD game, in most scenarios. However, the "4-to-1" ratio often cited is incredibly misleading, even erroneous, taken in any serious context.
