Cue publishers opening development studios in Poland.

That is seriously cheap.

lol maybe they get help from the goverment, like Canada does for their gaming studios or they have an indie philosophy (as in you get paid if the title makes profit) or they exploit the developers as work slaves hahha.

Well whatever it is, they are doing great things and i hope they hold onto this formula of succes, Square Enix should give them a call :D

they mean the money spend in h1 2013.. they already stated that full budget for W3 is 15 million dollar and a 25 million dollar advertising campaign

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=62992246#post62992246

the developers in germany have to pay probably some million for energy lol. 

They are actually a pretty small studio  and they expensed the engine seperately (like Crytek and Epic do). Currently they have 150 people at their main studio that is across 2-3 game projects (~83 on the Witcher 3 currently which is aparently almost twice the number of people that were working on TW2) and the RED Engine (~15 people).

Bioware for comparison was over 800 people as of 2010, tho at least half of them were working on TOR. Skyrim had 100+ developers on that game alone, the Witcher 3 is aparently 20% bigger world and is a next gen game with cutting edge graphics, dynamic weather, multiple ways of completing every quest, and a 50h vs the 25-30h that bethesda claimed for Skyrim (took me about 10h while doing some side quests if I remember correctly lol) so pretty impressive.

Boy, did you give us some numbers to crunch! I'm loving it. I love details about developer studios, teams and all that.

I wonder why Bethesda still hasn't split their team in two. Well, a part of it starts to develop the next project far before the main project is finished, but full scale development doesn't start until current game is released. I mean, it will take 6 years between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, and 6 years between Skyrim and the next Elder Scrolls (although they hired Obsidian for New Vegas to come out only two years after F3 which was a brilliant move).

Meanwhile Bioware, I suspected they were a huge studio, they churn out MMOs, Dragon Ages and Mass Effects very fast.

I love that Witcher 3 will be bigger than Skyrim. That world will be exciting to explore.

Zarx, I like the Witcher, and Witcher 2 much more than skyrim (Which I don't really like that much).

But, I think you're inhaling too much CD Projekt fumes accepting what CD Projekt says as fact. Their 50 hours could be claimed just like skyrim which I agree was like 10 hours with a gazillion hours of sidequests. I also hope, that by adding all these things it doesn't go back to the bloat in witcher 1 which was lengthy and allowed multiple ways to complete quests but had a lot of fluff.

10.36 million seems reasonable reasonable w/o engine costs like you said. Factor in Engine costsand lower salary and you get a number comparable but to the costs of Dragon Age (Which was in development 7 years if I remember so it was not exactly the model of efficiency).

Of course it won't take 50h lol, developer playtime estimates are always inflated. That is kinda why I put the Skyrim comparison. Assuming a similar ratio you cwill probably be able to do the main quest in around ~20h padded out by the massive game world and the limited fast travel (you can only warp to main cities/towns not everywhere like Skyrim) if I had to guess. The main quest should be similar to the one in the Witcher 2 in length and hopefully quality (if not better lol).

Dragon Age was in preproduction and then development hell for a long time. So likely was a very small team for most of those years. The closest studio to CDPR in America is probably Obsidian with their ~100-140 devs (depending on how much work they have at the time) with 2 major projects and one small one currently, but they stagger their releases so that they can have one major project in full production at a time with a lot of overlap on their projects. Where as CDPR are staffing up two full indipendant teams (and a second smaller sister studio).

$10M for a game developed in eastern Europe? That's a lot.

I'm pretty sure they dont pay their designers and programmers peanuts. These are all people who have college degrees, not your low budget worker. They dont get payed as much as US ones im sure, but they are still well paid.