Any ideas on the costs of game development and its sched?

[devotedsniper]

Dunno how in depth your going to go but you might want to consider development tools costs a single license can cost thousands (top of my head example Visual Studio 2012 costs from 1.2k all the way up to 14k for a single license of ultimate). Thats all i have to add, the rest has been covered.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

Marketing costs an arm and a leg, I'll tell ya. Your game could be a piles of crap but with enough marketing you convinve a number of pepple to buy it... and feel satisfied.

 

[V da Mighty Taco]

If you're looking for a breakdown of the costs, the best I can come up with is this pic from the Skullgirls Indigogo campaign, which was only meant to add a few new characters to the game.



Keep in mind that this is just the breakdown of the costs of adding one character to the game as DLC and staff are being paid for 10 weeks of work. You can imagine the costs being exponentially higher on full games minus the "Rewards" part, especially when you add in marketing and any licensing fees if they use any pre-made engines like an Unreal engine or Havoc's physics engine.

If you're just looking for the total costs of a game, then there's a few out there like GTAIV where the total numbers were made public, though the breakdown of costs wasn't I don't think.

 

[ThriKreen]

50 people at average salary (70K) would mean ~50 million for a year (I'm just rounding up to the nearest 10 million) and ~90 for two. At 100 people it'd be ~90 million for a year and ~170 for two. It's an extreme oversimplification but it does sort of fall inside EC's guess. Maybe some cheaper AAA games.

You're off by a decimal place.

$50 million a year for 50 people means almost million per person ... I wish I made that much!

 

[DoPo]

50 people at average salary (70K) would mean ~50 million for a year (I'm just rounding up to the nearest 10 million) and ~90 for two. At 100 people it'd be ~90 million for a year and ~170 for two. It's an extreme oversimplification but it does sort of fall inside EC's guess. Maybe some cheaper AAA games.

You're off by a decimal place.

$50 million a year for 50 people means almost million per person ... I wish I made that much!

Erm...oops. For some reason I did 70K times 50 people times 12 months.

Hold on, you mean you don't make 70K a month? Man, how do you survive in that case?

 

[Something Amyss]

Dunno, may not be too far off if we're using some of ThriKreen's numbers.

Yes assumed numbers might be accurate if measured by other assumed numbers.