I was just wondering what is the average developement cost of today's game, current gen and next gen? I just thought the assembler would be the place to ask. :nod:
well (regarding consoles, since a PC game u can theoretically make it in your basement) you have your initial cost of creating an office,in the legal sense, and in extent a development house. After that, you have to bring in a few good names that have worked on some form of hit on some major platform, not so long ago (You will need them if you want to have any third party relationship with any console owner, e.g Nintendo- on the PC anyone plays freely), and then recruit some new talents to do the dirty work. That's some heavy overhead over there. Thereon, it depends which current or next-gen platform you re reffering to. Each company has their own finance plans and licensing agreements for giving out their Devkits, with nintendo being the most hard-assed (unless you want to do a GameBoy Colour project) Costs start rising depending on the size of your team working on the game, their experience and position in the team, as well as the time it will take to complete parts or the whole project. Outsourcing is costly too, but it's a double-edge sword. Developing tools and middlewear can cost you in time and money as well, so buying a license to use some existing tools isn't such a bad idea if you're in a hurry and with uncertain talents. (god bless Epic Megagames for example) Depending on if you use licensed music, content, or start advertising stuff in your game with banners, some costs go up and down. To wrap it up, you have the testers and debug team (inhouse or outsourced) etc Marketing is usually handled by the publisher obviously, and it costs tons if done properly. So as you see the costs are quite dynamic, and the only solid part of it is possibly the development licesing costs, e.g the Wii's that Nintendo has said to be less than 5K, and the Sony Ps2 that was 20K on its debut. Devotion, a small core team and lots of talent can get you places with relatively little cost, and especially on a PC game project. Hope this helped:020:
