Development costs?

[Cogman]

Ok, so my room mate asked me a question.

"How much do you think it would cost to develop Guitar Hero?"

I figured 6 months, 4 developers, $60K per year minimum. so I quoted probably around $120K

He looked at me in amazement and said "For one game?!?!?"

Now, I felt like I was quoting pretty low, because I didn't figure in Graphics development, Music licensing, ect.

Is my view on this skewed or where those numbers somewhere in the low ballpark.

 

[presidentender]

I think that's extremely low.

 

[drebo]

Way low.

You're forgetting all of the technical staff, production staff, music licensing, band (not all of the songs are based off the master tracks), marketing, hardware development, etc, etc.

Multiply that number by 10 and then by 10 again and you'll be in the ball park.

Some games, like those with live-action cutscenes, have even higher development costs.

 

[Markbnj]

Agreed. Developer salaries are a significant part of the cost, but only one part. I think drebo's estimate would still be low, maybe half or less, of the real total. The hardware development costs alone would be very significant. I wouldn't be surprised at a $25-30m development budget for that title.

 

[JasonCoder]

GH and its contemporaries are in a category of game development known as triple-A titles. These titles have SIGNIFICANT budgets. Think movie budgets. Like, movie with lots of explosions budget.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Off by at least an order of magnitude

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
Off by at least an order of magnitude

I guess I was going by only the actual development of the game. I figured that it really isn't THAT complex of a game to make.

However, you guys are definitely right that there are several costs that I wasn't accounting for. Ill have to let him know that the range is more like 10m-100m (That'll show them business majors for thinking they can get by giving only a shoe string salary to their R&D)

 

[Onund]

Not to mention that salary is only a portion of the cost of a developer. You have to figure in benefits and bonuses onto the salary plus any license fees for development tools.

A previous company I worked for would bill just over $5k per week per engineer on project budgets. This was at a semiconductor company, the salaries+benefits are probably comparable, I'm not sure about tool licensing fees though but would guess they're in the ball park.

I should say this company did bill the engineer time a little high. They simply figured the average cost across the company and applied it universaly.

 

[brandonb]

Higher!

It's said as an industry as a whole, the numbers for producing the game is nearly equivilent to producing a movie.

A low budget game might cost a few million, and a hugh budget 50 million.

I just looked at the manual online of a low budget game X3 reunion and viewed the credits, atleast 50 people in there. That does not include costs for computers, offices, benefits, taxes, royalties, platform costs (developer tools, be it programmnig, 3d software, music editing programs, source control, etc), hardware for musicians such as keyboards mixers.

The only game company I have inside knowledge of used to buy an engine from a single guy (this guy made a living updating/maintaining a game engine for this company and asked for $50k a year) and they'd pay $40k a year for someone to design missions. So the overhead for this one game was about $90k, and they used to sell it for $40 and would make about 30k sales. They did that about 5 times and finally went out of business. They said they only made about $12 a sale after all publisher fee's etc. Or $360,000 and they couldn't pay for the building, the engine, the developer, the owner on that amount.

 

[heymrdj]

Wikipedia makes me think that the development of the controllers + the first game was a budget of 2.75M. Of course now I would guess 20x that for GH:WT.

 

[mugs]

Guitar Hero is probably one of the less expensive games to develop, because they basically release the same game over and over again with new songs and slight differences.

Typically though, video games cost millions to develop. The instruction manuals often have a list of everyone involved in the development, and it's usually several pages of small type. 4 developers? More like a couple dozen.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Initial cost for GH was probably a lot but now it's just a rehash so development costs are low. Licensing songs and guitars is constant.

 

[Drakkon]

The one 3d product I was in on was an educational game for a large publishing house. Nowhere near as large as Guitar Hero. Took about 2 years of development and total cost to cover the ENTIRE project (including people/equipment/testing/publishing) was around $3m. I'm thinking guitar hero for all its facets would easily be 10x that.