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HappySqurriel on 20 October 2007
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Legend11 said:

I think it's impossible to calculate a budget based on the number of people working on a game simply because it's hard to tell how many of the people working on it are working for outside contractors.

For example there are companies in India that have what amounts to digital sweatshops where row after row of computer artists work in shifts making graphic assets for games. These people get paid a lot less than Western employees and because there are so many of them the companies are able to deliver work at much less cost.

So when a developer says that they have 150 or 200 or whatever number of people working on their game 50-100 (or possibly more) or those people may actually be those from the contractor. Don't get me wrong though I'm not saying all games with large numbers of people working on them do that but some definitely do.

Note: (Here's an example of some contractors and I'm not claiming any of these have sweatshops like the one I mentioned above (but there definitely is at least one out there like that...) http://www.gamasutra.com/contractwork/gameproduction.php)


It is difficult to come to an exact dollar figure, but being that you can use contractors for everything from GBA games to PS3 games it is reasonable to anticipate certain ratios between development.

Saying you can get 4 to 5 Wii development teams for every PS3 development team is not that crazy, he could have easily went from one extreme (MGS4 with 200 developers) to the other extreme (Trauma Center with 20 developers) and claimed that you could get 10 Wii development teams from every PS3 development team.