ICStats said:
BlkPaladin said:
Most of that probably went into pay for the developers, artist and outside talent.
The first reference to Destiny was in 2009 so development probably was started then, but it was a side job done by a few people. The game didn't go into "full" development until 2011. So two-or-three people proablly worked on it from 2009-to-2011, and then the full team from that point forward.
Not to mention that the 500 million was a figure dropped by Bobby Kotick and latter denied by bungie. So it probably was the estimated budget Activision was willing to give them at the time. (Wikipedia acticle on Bungie)
But back to make quick and dirty figures. 2-to-3 people making around 80k a year (gamasutra). That would be 160-to-240k a year for two years so 320k-to-480k during that time.
Now Bungie has about 160 employees, for the next three years they work on the game August 2011-to-August 2014. That is about 3.9 million during that time. This is just for the staff, not for any equipment they needed, outside work they needed done.. So I'm guessing the actual development cost is the range of 100 million-to-150 million. We will probably find that out when they have their financials covered at Activision's End of Year.
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Bungie said they had 500 people working on Destiny.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/4/28/5651034/destiny-preview-playable-bungie-vs-halo
$80k a year per employee is pretty uncertain. Some companies have costs over $200k+ per employee between salaries, taxes, benefits & facilities. Depends on the location of course, and artists earn less than programmers on average. A lot of the "500" is likely to be art production outsourced to cheaper countries.
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80k a year is the median pay for game developers. (Actually I made it a little lower since 2013 the medium was 84k, and I was starting in 09, and it's just quick numbers.)
And outsourcing isn't usually to cheaper countries. I did a report in school (college) about lost time and how much is costs having people sit idel because they are waiting for outsourcing etc to finish. China is actually pretty expensive, I used China because that is what Activision used to out source parts of CoD.
