Guess the development budget

from GalCiv3 Forums

I thought it might be fun to see what people think it cost to make games these days. Maybe the devs will get a laugh out of it :D 

Here is my take on it:

 

assumptions:

-A game developer in a first world country cost $10,000 per month, all things considered (salary, equipment, training cost, rent for the building, conferences, etc)(based on hearing some game devs talk about this as a ballpark number)

-game has been in development for ~2.5 years from start to launch.

-team size has on average been 15 people.

-support staff (QA, HR, PR, janitor, etc) has been on average 20 people, these cost half of what a dev cost (5,000/month)(cost less primarily because they are not full time on galciv)

if you multiply those numbers, you end up with a budget of 7.5 million dollars.

 

next assumption: the game will sell for 25 dollars on average. More during pre-order/launch, less in sales and when time goes on. Steam takes 30% of that so 17,50 goes to stardock.

This would mean they would have to sell 425,000 copies before they make a profit. (ignoring factoring in future DLC/expansions which have a higher return on investment)

 

Anyone else care to take a guess? Do you feel the numbers make sense? to high or low guesstimates? 425,000 feels like a bit high to me but the business plan also relies on DLC and expansions.

 

 

 

17,275 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Well, if we reconsider GC3 is a 64bit portation of GC2, you may not need designing from scratch. This cuts out 1/3 up to 1/2 of development time I guess. 

They sold how many founders edition for ~90 bucks? I am pretty sure they had basic revenue before they coded a simple line. Otherwise they would not accept 50% off pricing on Steam the other week. So I do assume your calculation should be cutted down to 1/3 to get near to realism. Not prooving your pre-calculation, I'd say with arround 150.000 copies to reach finanial goal they are very well balanced.  

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

This is my figure....

Each employee makes an average of $60k a year plus insurance and taxes.  All and all about $100k per year.

Building expenses $10k mnth

15 employees

Equipment $100k one time expense.

Utility charges (including Internet access) $2K mnth

Game development time frame 3 Years...

$4.5 million employee salary.

$360k building lease.

$100k equipment

$73k utilities

Total...  About $5 Million  Game average sales through lifetime $25, Steam cut average 35% Company gets $16.25.

This would mean sell 310K copies (approx) to break even not counting extras...

We should get rewards for whomever is closest.... ;)

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I don't know why I have this feeling that these numbers are all way too low, but I will go with a cost of $10 Million and a target sale of 1 million copies, which will build a slush fund for the DLCs (plus a bit of profit for Brad).

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

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Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

This figure is probably without developers pay,  but i heard it was 40,000$. Even if the game had to be sold in the hundreds of thousands i'm sure the sales are in the millions considering that there are seven billion people on the planet.