Scisca said:
HoloDust said:
Yes it is a major factor. Cost of development in Poland, Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine or some other similar country is much lower than in US.
Which does not mean per se that CDRP is not more efficient (as they're pobably are) than Bethesda or Crytek, and that dev costs are lower simply due to coutry in which they are located.
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The only difference is in the wages for devs. In this part of Europe, when a person earns $30k a year, he's like a king :P $20k would also be considered a very good wage especially for a young person like a programmer. So there are savings in this area, but when you have to pay licences, fees, buy hardware etc. - it's the same everywhere. So savings are there, but they aren't large enough to justify Witcher 3 being made for 15 mil and Crysis 3 being made for 66 mil. I think the real difference is that CDPR hasn't gone crazy about their achievements, they aren't throwing cash left and right, but have their feet firmly planted in the groud and are reasonable about the budgets and their earnings. They have shown many times they prefer to take babysteps to risky big leaps and it is paying thus far. Everything they do on their own does seem to work out really well - The Witcher series (I hope for PS4/Xbone remakes of 1 & 2), GOG.com and hopefully Cyberpunk 2077 will be a success as well.
I think the real reason why Crytek is going bust is because they missed the Vita train. Companies would be buying tons of licences of a Vita port of CryEngine to develop all those AAA Western Vita games in it!! That was the nail in the coffin I tell ya!
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I think that people hugely underestimate how important this part is.
Imagine that you hypothetically have 200 strong team (like on Witcher 3) - in several reports (and you mentioned it too) I've seen $20K as average annual salary for programmers. Compare that to around $80-90K in US (salary reports from Gamasutra) and do some math and you will get to $4 millions in Poland vs $16-18 millions in US...per year.
(There's a good interview with Jack Rubin about development of Metro: Last Light, under what conditions it was made and how cheap it was made (compared to western counterparts) due to being made in Ukraine under not so great conditions.)
Not defending CryTek here, they were gone in my eyes long time ago, but there is a significant difference depending in which country you're developing your game (and, from what I've seen, Germany is just slightly less expensive than US).
