80 Million?

ronnoc10 · 05-31-2007, 06:43 PM

I've been playing the wonderful Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and I took a look at Silicon Knights, and their most recent progect Too Human, which has a buget of 80,000,000! I have been working out figures all day, and I can't comperhend where all the money is going. From what I can tell, they would have to buy: 10 years of man hours, hardware for workers, dev kits for 3 systems, the Unreal 3 engine + any other engines, and voice actors.

No matter how I work it, it doesn't even come to half of 80 million. I feel I am missing a big part of the development cycle or something...

insidious · 06-20-2007, 02:27 PM

My guess is that the main component you're missing is the developer hours. You're figuring 10 years of man hours. To compare this to some other games in development: Spore has a 70 man team working on it, and The Godfather had a team of 240. Development teams can be huge, and that equals big bucks for the companies. From the looks of the graphics in Too Human, I think it's fair to say that they have quite a few talented artists on staff. I wouldn't be surprised if their development team is over 100 people, which translates into 200-300 (-500?) man years of development (possibly at ~$60,000 / man year)

ronnoc10 · 06-20-2007, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by insidious

My guess is that the main component you're missing is the developer hours. You're figuring 10 years of man hours. To compare this to some other games in development: Spore has a 70 man team working on it, and The Godfather had a team of 240. Development teams can be huge, and that equals big bucks for the companies. From the looks of the graphics in Too Human, I think it's fair to say that they have quite a few talented artists on staff. I wouldn't be surprised if their development team is over 100 people, which translates into 200-300 (-500?) man years of development (possibly at ~$60,000 / man year)

You have a point. For some reson I figured they had a 50 man team, but I don't remeber where I came up with that number...

HagNasty · 06-21-2007, 07:25 AM

Also that most likely includes a very large marketing plan. The would most likely outsource cinimatic animations, testing, render farms, contract audio, ect. It's insane. Though 80 million is still a stupid amount of money

simonc · 06-21-2007, 07:43 AM

$80 million seems high to me. We've had a few budgets revealed in Game Developer magazine, and the two I recall - Psychonauts and King Kong - were around the $15 million mark. (And Psychonauts was only that high because they had a lot of production trouble.)

icemotoboy · 07-15-2007, 07:42 PM

Microsoft Game Studios spends big $$$ on its RPG's. Theres an ever increasing number of games coming out with budgets above the 20mil mark.