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QuintonMcLeod on 02 July 2014
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zarx said:

I am not justifying it I am explaining the realities of the situation.

A studio with 50 (Airtight are 51+ acording to linkedin) employees in America is $350k+ a month on just wages (add more for taxes, rent, utilities, medical etc etc). So given your rediculous $3 million budget example that is 8 and a half months of development for 50 people a studio would need to release 2 or more games of that size every year just to keep everyone payed and the lights on. And to give you an idiea of the kind of game $3 million buys you that is less than half a 2D point and click adventure game by Double Fine (a company that has 65 employees and is currently developing 6 announced projects at once 2 of which were crowd funded because publishers didn't want to publish them) it really isn't a lot of money.


Now how the games business works for indipendant developers that don't own the IP is you have a budget say for something like Murdered I would say ~$20 million, but it of course varies from game to game. That budget will be worked out with the publisher and developer based on the number of staff working on the project and the length of development. That is payed out in installments bassed on progress on creating the game. If the developer misses a development milestone then depending on the contract the publisher could give them extra money or withold payment or worst case cancel the game. This is why game developers have to often indure brutal crunch with lots of unpayed overtime to avoid missing milestones, if you are lucky you may get a couple % profit but as I pointed out that won't buy much time. And if you don't spend the budget on devloping the game you will most likely miss your miletones and end up not getting payed at all. Once the game is complete they will usually get payed in a combination of 3 ways a completion bonus for finishing the project on time, a royalty based on sales (in most cases the devloper will get nothing or a tiny amount until the publisher makes back their money so if the project underperforms the developer could end up only barely breaking even), or worst case scenario based on metacritic score (which can lead to heartbreaking resaults like for example Obsidian getting no royalties from Fallout New Vegas because they where one point on metacritic below their goal). These should give the developer enough of a buffer to line up their next work It's brutal but that is the reality of publishing deals with indipendant developers. Publishers aren't charities, they pay for services rendered not for developers to line their own pockets. No matter the size a developer is not going to get work if they can't make a successful game.

If you make games that don't sell at best the developer would be just over breaking even (tho if they make a hit depending on their contract they could become rich). So developers have to alwayse have new projects to keep their employees payed if they don't make succesful games, naturally if you make games that don't sell publishers don't want to give you money to make game big or small and you go under. And you idea of if your games sell poorly just make games with budgets that small idea is incredibly naive. Less budget means less money spent making and marketing your game, which usually (unless you are increadibly lucky) means lower sales and or a lower price point which means you will most likely still lose money exept now you have to make more pitches to publishers to make more games which means even less time actually making games which leads to lower quality products or mass layoffs.

Small studios making small games go under all the time as well, they just don't make the news. For every indie success story there are 20 failures. Making any game big or small is a risk and no one is going to give you free money. If you can't make successful games no one is going to keep paying you.

No.

Indie developers are creating games with only several 100 thousand dollar budgets. Don't give me that "Oh, the publisher will give them 20 million." Several million dollars is only needed for large AAA budget games. I'm saying making such games are disasterous in this market if done poorly. Many of these AAA games ARE done very very poorly.

Listen. 8 million is how much they have to work with after royalties, operating costs and etc. based from only 300k worth of sales.

300,000 x $60 = $18,000,000 - ($10 million for everything else) = $8,000,000. I've also rounded the expenses up so to intentionally bloat the amount of off-project expenses to further make my point.

When a game need to sell 4 million copies to break even, that's a problem! Do the math:

4,000,000 x $60 = $240,000,000 - ($220 million for off project expenses [this is a severely bloated number.]). That's ridiculous. 

 

Secondly, an indie studio that large should not waste so much manpower on one game. With a 100 man team, you can split them to two teams of 50 people and have two projects simultaneously while NOT focusing on AAA budgets. This is how you keep food on the table while not spending ridiculous amounts of money and betting on only one or two projects to stay afloat. This is called business sense.