A biased review: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

[Faxanadu]

TheWPCTraveler said:

blackjackk said:

Samus Aran said:

blackjackk said:

Eh I don't think ALL developers are paid 10k a month. Probably not even 10% make that kind of dough. I know you're factoring in other costs, but still that's incredibly high considering a lot of those are already paid for and they don't pay for dev kits and a lot of those things more than once.

 

"So let’s do that for Shovel Knight!  These days, most studios will put the average cost of a developer on a game at around a $10k man month.  What does that mean? Essentially, each developer will cost the company 10,000 dollars a month or 120,000 dollars a year.  Now, of course, not every developer on the team makes that much money and often, NONE of the developers on the team make that much money.

That’s because this monthly $10k goes into much more than just paying the salary of the employee.  It covers any and all expenses accumulated from having that employee on site.  That includes not only individual expenses for the employee like salary, health insurance, etc but also company expenses like rent, electricity, water, food/snacks, conventions, computer and other equipment, software licenses, lawyer fees, taxes, development kit expenses…the list goes on and on"

READ. 

Still 10k a month is probably a high estimate. You can't factor in all of that stuff every month.

This. I honestly think a lot of those people were pried away from Captain Toad for another game, especially when it takes this game half the time to develop as its parent, which was much more ambitious.

Actually 120k is a good estimate. I often use between 100k-120k Euro for all in employee costs in IT companies. Is a figure that holds up well, even against benchmarks.

I think where he got it wrong is assuming that all 75 people worked on the game for a full year. I would assume an average of maybe 6-8 months per listed member.