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Slimebeast on 05 November 2009
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aragod said:
Procrastinato said:

The 100K/year figure has been a good standard for estimating dev costs, as Slime says. It's probably closer to 110K/year nowadays.

There's much more than salary to consider in that, some of the major ones being:

  • Building/location
  • Equipment
  • Software licensing
  • Taxes (employers have to basically match income tax in the US)
  • Insurance


...which add up to a LOT, per developer, so you don't need to have a 100K/dev *salary* to have a 100K/dev/year average expense to develop a game. Not even close. Gamasutra, in fact, reports an average of about 80K per dev, with their annual salary survey, across all disciplines. I think its very close to estimate +20-30K per dev on top of that, for the costs above.

Slimebeast calculations, however, are way off. They don't take multiple projects, team growth, etc. into consideration. If Slimebeast's "prediction technique" were actually a good one, then "The Conduit", a Wii shooter, would have cost 150 employees (the size of the dev) x 2 years x 100K per employee, or 30 million. It cost around "12 million", according to the developer themselves, reported to GamaSutra, because a large portion of their costs are actually for shared engine development, and other projects.

GT5 cost 60 million, converted from yen spent over the past 5 years, to today's dollars, just as the dev said. Any other costs are accounted to other projects, and thus truly don't count toward GT5's budget. PD may already have GT6 in the works, for all we know, or another game we know nothing about.  The dev stated it in a public interview.  He was undoubtably authorized to do so.  Big companies don't make BS expense claims, for legal reasons, so I don't doubt its accuracy.

Being a sequel, I would wager GT6 will cost less than half that much, if that.

Just a quickie – this is bullshit. Development cost doesn't equal running of the company. Development = work on that particular title, which is mainly salary, than minor for technology and QA. When you start developing new project, you don't have to buy a new building, nor new software (unless you are new to the business). Talking apples and oranges here.

I believe often when budgets are released to the public, they are actually calculated by this method - that is, only the direct transient costs of dev team are included. out proportionally of course, so a big team accounts for a bigger chunk of the fixed costs of the house).

But Procrastinato's definition of the true cost (and thus budget) is the right one. All costs of running a software house must be included in the cost of every game.

That's what I believe is in the case of GT5 for example. The true cost of GT5 is probably much higher than $60 million. The money needed for a game to break even cannot only include the salaries for the dev team, because where else - than from game sales - comes the money needed to fund office space, rent, insurance, transportation, sound equipment, PR & marketing trips, logistics, lawyers and accountants, administration etc?

So the 'budget' could well be $60 million for GT5, but the revenue needed to break even is a lot higher.