XBOX |OT|

[shikamaru317]

konnichiwa said:

shikamaru317 said:

If the 400k sales is true, and the 700k premium edition as of October 10th is true, we'd be at around 400k sales and 900k-1m premium edition upgrades right now as of October 30 most likely. So 400k times an average price of lets say $80 ($70 for standard and $100 for people who bought premium edition to start with equals $32m. 900k x $30 is $27m. So $55m in direct revenue so far. What we don't know is how many Gamepass sub it drove or how many months they stay subbed for, one of the day one Gamepass factors that go into a success formula. 

We're probably tracking towards 3x this nearly first month revenue figure lifetime, so $165m in direct revenue lifetime. Add on whatever the revenue is from Gamepass subs the game caused, against a $400m budget figure, which likely isn't that high because it appears to be the entire studio's spending over the 6 years Gears E-Day was in development for, which includes toolsets being built for Unreal 5 development across all Xbox studios and at least 3 non-Gears games being directly assisted on by The Coalition.

Gears of War: E-Day did cost $500 million, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier: "That is a real number. That is real. That's what we're looking at here, that's what [AAA] games cost to make. Especially in North America these days".

Just another reminder that Xbox should have invested in other regions that are so much cheaper like Asia.

Something still feels off about that number to me. Exactly how many assistance studios worked on Gears E-Day, has anyone looked through the credits to see? At The Coalition itself, there are 271 people working there according to LinkedIn. The average pay for video game design in Vancouver Canada is around $82k a year Canadian, which because the US dollar is worth 71% of Canadian dollar, shrinks the average pay for Vancouver to $58k USD a year. Benefits packages tend to amount to about 40% of salary, so another $24k a year on benefits packages. So, around $83k a year USD per year per employee at The Coalition.

So 271 people times $83,000 pay times 6 years = $134m in payroll and benefits over the 6 years that Gears E-Day was in development for. Let's assume that The Coalition pays 30% more than the average for a game studio in Vancouver because they are a high end AAA studio. That is still is just $174m in payroll and benefits at The Coalition itself over the 6 years Gears E-Day was in development for.

How the hell does $174m balloon into $500m? I know that they aren't paying the voice actors movie actor tier paychecks, many aren't getting more than the SAG-AFTRA minimum for digital media voice acting, which is now $1.1k per 4 hour, 3 character recording booth session and another $236 towards their own private pension and health insurance plan. Maybe Marcus Fenix himself, John DiMaggio, a legend in the voice acting community, got like $1m total for all of his voice acting sessions for Marcus in E-Day, but few are the voice actor that are popular enough to negotiate to anywhere near that amount.

Basically, for $174m to balloon into $500m, they would need to have at least 300 devs across all support studios working on the game the entire 6 years, and for those support studios to be in high cost of living US cities where pay is the highest. If that is the case, AAA dev team sizes sure do need to shrink, because damn that is an insane manhour figure.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - 7 hours ago