I just wanted to comment on the 4 to 5 Wii development teams for ever PS3 development team ...
Gamasutra has been doing portmortems on games for a decade and (rarely) they tell you the total development cost but you can (typically) get some idea of the expense from these articles:
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Rogue Leader Publisher: Lucas Arts Entertainment
Number of full-time developers: 30
Number of contractors: 2
Estimated budget: $3.5 million
Length of development: 9 months
Release date: November 8, 2001
Platform: Nintendo Gamecube
Development hardware used: GDEV & 1GHz PC, running Windows 2000
Development software used: SN Systems for Gamecube, Slickedit, Maya
Notable technologies: MusyX 2.0
Project size: 14.2MB of source in 859 files, in-game source data 6.4GB in 10,075 files
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(NOTE: 30 Developers, 9 Months, $3.5 Million which is much higher than my $100,000 per developer per year estimate)
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Jak & Daxter: the Precursor Legacy Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Number of full-time developers: 35
Length of development: 1 year of initial development, plus 2 years of full production
Release date: December, 2001
Platform: Playstation 2
Development software used: Allegro, Common Lisp, Visual C++, Maya, Photoshop, X Emacs, Visual Slick Edit, tcsh, Exceed, CVS
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TRON 2.0
Publisher: Buena Vista Interactive
Number of full-time developers: 21
Number of part-time developers: 4 - 5 pulled in as needed plus the use of Monolith's internal sound, music, and motion capture facilities and personnel.
Contractors: Cinematic music scoring, motion capture actors, voice actors
Length of development: 2 years
Release Date: August 26, 2003
Target Platform: PC
Development Hardware: Pentium 1.0 - 2.0 GHz machines with 256 - 512MB RAM, GeForce 1 - 4 video cards
Development Software: Lithtech DEdit/ModelEdit, Microsoft Visual Studio (C++), Photoshop, Maya, Editplus 2
Notable Technologies: Lithtech Jupiter Development System
Project Size: 2,400 files, 853,300 lines of code | |
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Now, being that Wii development is on a similar scale to Gamecube, PS2 and XBox development I think these games are representative of Wii development costs. Unfortunately, we only have 1 postmortem from an XBox 360/PS3 game (MotoGP07) which doesn't list the number of employees; one thing I have seen mentioned about several games is development teams of 80 to 200 people working for (at least) 2 years.
