The Witcher 2 Cost $10,36 Million – The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 Will Cost $2,82 Million In H1 2013

[zarx]

ishiki said:

zarx said:

Slimebeast said:

Yeah, I know. That's why I'm a lil suspicious Witcher 2 only cost $10 million. Comparable titles like Dragon Age, Fallout and Elder Scrolls probably cost $40 million and up.

So even for a Polish dev $10 million sounds very cheap. What a bargain!

They are actually a pretty small studio  and they expensed the engine seperately (like Crytek and Epic do). Currently they have 150 people at their main studio that is across 2-3 game projects (~83 on the Witcher 3 currently which is aparently almost twice the number of people that were working on TW2) and the RED Engine (~15 people).

Bioware for comparison was over 800 people as of 2010, tho at least half of them were working on TOR. Skyrim had 100+ developers on that game alone, the Witcher 3 is aparently 20% bigger world and is a next gen game with cutting edge graphics, dynamic weather, multiple ways of completing every quest, and a 50h vs the 25-30h that bethesda claimed for Skyrim (took me about 10h while doing some side quests if I remember correctly lol) so pretty impressive.

Zarx, I like the Witcher, and Witcher 2 much more than skyrim (Which I don't really like that much).

But, I think you're inhaling too much CD Projekt fumes accepting what CD Projekt says as fact. Their 50 hours could be claimed just like skyrim which I agree was like 10 hours with a gazillion hours of sidequests. I also hope, that by adding all these things it doesn't go back to the bloat in witcher 1 which was lengthy and allowed multiple ways to complete quests but had a lot of fluff.

10.36 million seems reasonable reasonable w/o engine costs like you said. Factor in Engine costsand lower salary and you get a number comparable but to the costs of Dragon Age (Which was in development 7 years if I remember so it was not exactly the model of efficiency).

Of course it won't take 50h lol, developer playtime estimates are always inflated. That is kinda why I put the Skyrim comparison. Assuming a similar ratio you cwill probably be able to do the main quest in around ~20h padded out by the massive game world and the limited fast travel (you can only warp to main cities/towns not everywhere like Skyrim) if I had to guess. The main quest should be similar to the one in the Witcher 2 in length and hopefully quality (if not better lol).

Dragon Age was in preproduction and then development hell for a long time. So likely was a very small team for most of those years. The closest studio to CDPR in America is probably Obsidian with their ~100-140 devs (depending on how much work they have at the time) with 2 major projects and one small one currently, but they stagger their releases so that they can have one major project in full production at a time with a lot of overlap on their projects. Where as CDPR are staffing up two full indipendant teams (and a second smaller sister studio).