People don't like to be wrong, and they like to think they know more than they actually do. At least some people have learned something here, I hope.
Please tell Bahi JD I'm looking forward to his work with Studio BONES.
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"How the hell does *that* cost $X to make???" (Giant Bomb and Skullgirls)
- Thread starter dLMN8R
- Start date
People don't like to be wrong, and they like to think they know more than they actually do. At least some people have learned something here, I hope.
Please tell Bahi JD I'm looking forward to his work with Studio BONES.
SouthernDragon
Member
I read a little more. I would love to sit down and interview Ravidrath, what an excellent look into the industry.
In LA I don't think 28k/yr is getting by. That's fucking awful.
They are, actually, quite the opposite and are fundamental to the game.
GAF's OT impresses me with the breadth and depth of knowledge on display. It seems I have been wise to abandon the Gaming side...
In LA I don't think 28k/yr is getting by. That's fucking awful.
They are, actually, quite the opposite and are fundamental to the game.
GAF's OT impresses me with the breadth and depth of knowledge on display. It seems I have been wise to abandon the Gaming side...
The dishwasher at my old job made more than that, and he got benefits and free lunch.
That's the problem though. The diversities in the hurt boxes are not superficial and several people pointed out why. You know why Kuma has an absurd hurtbox? Because he gets certain advantages from being so big also. Like the absurd range of his twin pistons (similar to Jack d/f2). And falling out of a lot of mid stage standard juggles due to his short legs.
This is very much intended and not superficial. Your example is flawed.
Yabdbadbdadbda
Banned
wow a bunch of people who dont work in the games industry and did not get an education to become a part of said industry dont know how it works? "wow u guys r stupid xd"
how is this our fault? thats like insulting a guy who is a doctor for not knowing how to repair his car
maybe if the industry was more transparent about what actually goes on during development instead of treating it like a big secret club where they treat their customers like second class citizens that need them to survive there wouldnt be such overwhelming misinformation across the board(s) regarding development
As an aside, there is similar disbelief whenever we hear that games like GTAIV cost 100M to make, or that development teams for PS4/720 projects may go northward of 500 people (That's a thread currently ongoing, and yes, there are similarly people who simply refuse to believe that AAA projects on PS4/720 could need teams that big). Many people attribute these costs to laziness or disorganized development that could be cut hugely if these publishers got their stuff together and were more efficient -- although no one ever specifies what those efficiencies are; they just assume that they exist and that lots of money could be saved if EA/Take 2/Ubisoft were just more vigilant, or something. Surely figures that high are evidence of gross incompetence!
People don't like to think about how sausage is made. Some people simply ignore the process entirely, because it can be gross or depressing. A few others, however, vehemently deny the sausage making process altogether, because they find it unpleasant to imagine that something they enjoy so much has such brutal economics behind it.
People don't like to think about how sausage is made. Some people simply ignore the process entirely, because it can be gross or depressing. A few others, however, vehemently deny the sausage making process altogether, because they find it unpleasant to imagine that something they enjoy so much has such brutal economics behind it.
To be fair there are a lot of ways to do animation much cheaper than to handdraw 1500 frames per character in that level of quality; 2D skeletal systems, rotoscoping 3D models etc. Obviously it wouldn't yield the same quality, but a lot of the people in this thread aren't that familiar with the game, and not really aware of how ambitious the game was.
That's the thing, though, the first few pages they have explained things, there's also that damn article that goes over things, and people STILL say that they're wrong and that they can make an MMO in their basement with their closet as the VA studio and their 10-year old desktop server, so they should do the same.
That's like me going to where you work because you invited me and I'm pointing out how fucking wrong you are at what you're doing even though I have no idea what I or you are doing.
You'd be pissed off, too.
freenudemacusers
Member
it's really impressive to me how many in here think that outsourcing to specialists is dumb and inefficient for a small development company. I mean, you are printing the manuals on your own inkjet right?
Yeah Muramasa does that, right? That's what I was thinking too initially, but as I understand every frame in Skullgirls is handdrawn (relatively) anew. I can totally see how that would ramp up the cost.
One would hope that the average GAF poster is a bit more educated about the games industry than a GameFAQs poster. This information is out there if you want to find it
freenudemacusers
Member
or just educated about the general way the economy works.
Devolution
Member
I'm not even talking about that. Artists don't just jump digitally (and I'm not saying people who basically draw digitally are skipping a step because they're not, they're still sketching) without doing shit tons of thumbnails. The idea that something should be just be 3d sculpted through some new tool is avoiding the point of thumbnails and rough sketches.
You do know that making any kinds of tools takes a lot of time and, thus, money? I mean, there are no magic tools that will make everything easy and super-cheap, but there are of course tools that can make development a bit speedier. Still, as said, making those kinds of tools takes a lot of effort from the developers part. I mean, for example, SQEX had huge problems with development efficiency during this PS360 gen (they wanted to achieve that certain level of quality in visuals they are known for, but by their dated methods & tools it was really time-consuming & pretty much impossible). That's why they started to develop the Luminous Studio (almost) 3 years ago already. Their aim is to make their development more efficient, but to do so they need a huge initial investment on the Luminous Engine. And they seem to pulling it off nicely, based on Agni's Philosophy.
And of course Epic has been developing Unreal Engine 4 for a long time as well. Capcom has their new one and I'm sure other big publishers have worked on theirs as well.
So.. yeah, creating those more efficient tools & stuff ain't cheap. If you want to do it properly it'll take years and you probably have to sink millions in doing it. It's not exactly something a small indie dev can do. That's why something like Unity & it supporting most platforms under the sun is a godsend to indie devs.
All right, I'm gonna go through this one more time.
Before I start off, though, let me give you a little background. With the exception of Ravi himself, there is almost certainly no one on GAF who is more qualified to talk about voiceover in games. Not only am I literally a voice actor in Skullgirls (AND League of Legends, and several other games), but I run my small indie studio, which made a game with over 1,400 lines of fully voiced dialogue, certainly more than Bastion and likely more than most, if not all, indie games out there.
The question, of course, would immediately come up: how much did I spend on Sequence voiceovers? The answer is, truthfully, about $2,200, but this is an incredibly misleading number. Several...well, most...of the actors in Sequence were my friends, who worked for free. My friend Geoff, the audio engineer, mastered and edited over 1,400 lines *for free*. And of course, all the work I did...directing, picking takes, inserting into the game, modifying for time, and let's not forget, writing all the lines themselves...was unpaid. The studio was out of some guy's house; he charged me $40/hr, but it was mainly for the microphone. We recorded in a living room, for the most part. The quality wasn't horrible...I doubt many people were yelling at the screen...but from a professional standpoint, it was pretty rough.
I still feel bad about doing this, and I love my friends dearly for helping me. I had no choice; I couldn't pay more money, everything was out of pocket, I was a 23-year-old struggling to live in Los Angeles paying the bills via SAT/ACT/GRE tutoring. But *I can never do this again*. A professional studio, making a game that isn't just a project of passion but a proper, commercial endeavor that's meant to help support actual full-time jobs, *CANNOT JUST NOT PAY PEOPLE A FAIR WAGE*. It's insulting and, frankly, illegal. If EA told you to come in a do a shitton of work on Mirror's Edge 2, would you do it for free? No. You wouldn't. Your skills and time are worth money, and you expect to be compensated accordingly. In my next game, There Came an Echo, I've already paid the VOICEOVER STUDIO ALONE (Soundelux Design Music Group) over eight thousand dollars for their services, nearly $7,000 in SAG/AFTRA fees, and suffice to say, Wil Wheaton's acting isn't free either. I did this because this is what it costs, this is the price of entry, for the highest quality voiceover services in a game that absolutely requires those services to reach its highest potential.
Ravi (who I know personally, by the way, and is sacrificing a lot for himself and his team even with the 150k) isn't doing that. Ravi is making the best use of his money. He's hired Cristina Vee to direct...with whom I was hanging last night, by the way, and she was utterly appalled at this shit...who charges an utter pittance compared to hotshot Hollywood VO directors who wouldn't do any better a job, they're using an independent voiceover studio and a single sound engineer to run the whole setup, which is pretty shockingly professional for the cost. And I'm sure they have someone in-house doing all the editing, mastering, and placement for the VO lines, which is extremely time-consuming.
Two voice actors, a director, a sound engineer, studio costs, equipment costs, and a pretty massive workload back at the office...and you people are bitching about four thousand dollars? Honestly, fuck off. You have no idea what you're talking about, you want quality for pennies, you want people to work for free, or fucking pizza, or something. It's demeaning. I can't speak for animation...Noogy's got you covered on that...but I can speak for this.
As a chef, making sausage is truly fascinating. It's one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen, its really more of an art.
Mr.Wreckless
Banned
No it's like showing up to your doctor, having him tell you what's wrong, then you start telling him why he is wrong when all the medical knowledge you have received came from House.
If people have no idea how something works they shouldn't be so vocal in telling people involved in that industry how they are doing something wrong.
That, and that I should feel like a dick for complaining about high quality DLC costing $5-$10.
Considering how your posts have not contributed to the discussion nor conveyed any sort of intention for positive outreach to developers, your excuses for being skeptical aren't merited at all. So glad to see your username in gray.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
A tiny bit of development education happened when Farsight put up their kickstarter for the Twilight Zone pinball table licensing fee. Followed by the Star Trek: TNG licensing fee. There were a fair number of people on the net who initially freaked out at "fifty thousand dollars for a fake pinball table?"
But eventually the point got across that yes, there are complications that make this stuff cost. And those pinball kickstarters were for nothing more than the licensing overhead for the right to display the TZ and TNG media assets.
A number of failed or retracted kickstarters have happened where a bunch of people got together and asked for say, 50-200k for making what they dreamed would be the equivalent of a triple-A online shooter or epic open world PC RPG.
Apparently you're banned, but I'll respond anyway.
It's not your fault. And I said the industry is largely to blame in an earlier post, by lying about budgets. And that Kickstarter and the mod scene has grossly distorted people's perceptions of what game development costs.
The problem with your analogy is that a doctor probably wouldn't try to tell a mechanic how terrible their estimates are, how they're bad managers and inefficient, and how there is clearly some ulterior motive at play. They would shop around and go with the guy that was the cheapest and seemed the most reliable.
A more apt analogy would be a panel of doctors yelling at GM because they don't understand how it can cost several billion dollars to design and manufacture a new model of car. And especially one they find so ugly!
That is basically what is happening here and in the comments of Joystiq, Kotaku, etc. and that's acceptable behavior, apparently, because it's the internet.
Absolutely, and I'm glad Patrick touched on that in the article.
Most Kickstarters try to play on the psychology of people, who generally like to "back a winner." So they set their goal to be about half of what they need in hopes that "winning" sooner will get more people to contribute and build hype, and in the end it will carry them beyond what they actually need. But if they only end up making their goal or just over it, they're fucked.
I did not do this, because it would have royally fucked us if we hadn't gone way over the goal. Everything but the salaries in my breakdown are pretty much set in stone and non-negotiable, and the salaries are what the staff told me were the bare minimum they could get by on without needing to take another job.
SpinningBirdKick
Banned
This seems really low for professional development.
I guess they must have staff with little experience or the staff are happy to work for peanuts because of their passion for games.
As another note, I'm quite sure there are a lot of people who think Doctors are rich because health care costs so much and they hear Doctors have salaries upwards of 200,000, sometimes as high as 1M.
But if you actually analyze their salaries, the first thing you do is take out insurance costs, which are enormous because Doctors are sued regularly if they make the slightest mistake. Suddenly that 200k becomes 100-150k (and doctors that make 1M, such as anesthesiologists, literally have insurance that costs more than 500k/year in many cases, because when an anesthesiologist makes a mistake, it usually means their patient dies).
Then consider how many hours they work; 60 hours a week is common for Doctors, so consider that your 40 hour, 40k/year job could be supplemented with a part time 20k/year job and reach 60 hours. Lastly, consider medical school, which is insanely expensive and most doctors come out of medical school with far larger bills than do people who just went to state for 4 years. Suddenly they aren't so rich any more.
Well, you can't deny there isn't SOME fluff in the AAAAAAA development, we've heard the horror stories from some Rockstar games where huge chunks of games have been thrown out the window or how bad management has made development really inefficient (different people working on modelling the same thing etc.). Some of it is, of course, quite normal for any entertainment/creative industry (bands record songs that don't end up on albums, movie makers shoot and maybe even edit scenes that no one will ever see, parts of levels get cut to tighten up the pacing/because it's not fun/etc.), but there's also some inefficiency. I guess that's also somewhat normal as team sizes grow, but I'd say some of it could be eliminated with better management.
Cosmo Clock 21
Banned
Breast cancer research!
Truth being spoken here, and Feep has the cred to back it up. My game had 1700 lines of voiced dialogue, and it was a MASSIVELY difficult thing to manage. Voice talent is a woefully underappreciated and difficult skill, and there's nothing simple about the process. And let's not get into the technical aspect of actually getting that voice in the game.
Yep, this is a real issue. And the fact that there are so many 'pseudo-game making' tools available. You can easily build tracks in racing games, and levels in Little Big Planet. I even saw someone earlier compare making a character in Skullgirls shouldn't be much harder than customizing your own wrestler in a WWF game. It's nuts.
Like I've said in the past, it's not the consumer's responsibilty to know or care what games cost to make. But it is important to respect the medium when lashing out against budgets on a forum.
I don't consider that fluff. Part of the creative process is that some ideas don't work out. In movies, scripts get thrown out the window once they're theoretically complete; movies in progress of filming get canned. In music, songs are written and then rewritten; people brought in to write the soundtrack for something are replaced. This isn't a scientific process, so scrapping some pieces is an unavoidable concern.
Right, you've got the idea. I think what you're describing is unavoidable inefficiency. I want everyone to consider what the consequences would be if we insisted on absolute efficiency in a creative process like game design -- where the first try at every character design, the first draft of every script, the first attempt at every level design was the last one and no rework was allowed because it's inefficient.
From a strictly monetary perspective you're probably better off with a higher-paying engineering job that gets you to 6 figures in a hurry. Go to a state school, don't pay crazy tuition and you'll have enough in the bank by the time you're 30-35 to retire early and do whatever the fuck you want.
Thought we call that "flipping the tea table" in the gaming industry.
I agree, although the downside is that getting those jobs is notably less reliable. That is, there are a good number of engineers who do not end up getting those 100k/year jobs. The good ones do, but not everyone.
One of the reasons so many people find medical school so appealing is that it's so safe (unless you fail out, of course). If you complete medical school, even with mediocre grades, you're very, very likely to land a job with a six figure salary. I already detailed the downsides, but that upside of safe, reliable and dependable job prospects is something that many people find very appealing.
It starts becoming an issue when people make claims to knowledge from a place of ignorance.
Nobody insults the doctor that he doesn't know how to repair his car until he starts trying to tell the mechanic what to do and how he could do the job faster and cheaper.
The games industry is AMAZINGLY TRANSPARENT with regard to development as compared to almost any other industry out there.
Dev blogs and opinion pieces, making of videos, post mortems, lectures/presentations, dev community forums, interviews are all readily available and in spades.
The information is out there for people who care to look.
There's actually something useful in this for all the "modders do everything free" people, too.
Modders are doing it as a hobby, but many do it as a way to show that they can do the work and get a job in the industry. Hobby modding is going to medical school, basically.
Just because they are choosing not to take pay for it doesn't mean that their work isn't valuable. The general belief that because modders do something free means that all other industry work should be free just doesn't make any sense.
AstroNut325
Member
Reading this thread... YIKES! I feel bad for developers. According to NeoGAF all developers should be working for free or almost nothing and everything should be worth only a few dollars at best.
Ravi... you have my respect!
Ravi... you have my respect!
Angry Birds is the future of gaming!
toddhunter
Member
You seem to be talking the good sense. People also need to factor in opportunity cost.
Loved the work during the evo donation drive, best of luck with it.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
Like I observed a while back, I think many people see fanwork and mods given away for free as proof of how simple and easy creative work is, or even programming and design. Because of a reductionist attitude. "If this was worth anything they'd sell it."
Besides the fact that a lot of modders are using their "free" work to build a portfolio, another big point that keeps being reiterated is time. Lots of the indie games and free mods that would be compared against a professional, commercial work are created in spare time over months and sometimes years. But it seems many folks don't consider that. They just think about the end product.
If need something done to pro spec on a specific timetable, you pay dearly for it.
Warm Machine
Member
I can tell you how much our indie games have cost in real dollars and in "virtual" dollars.
Thank you for the insight Feep. Throughout this whole thread I've been in disbelief at some of the shit that's been said and I am seriously glad there are people like you, Ravi, Raging Spaniard, and others defending your positions even when it shouldn't even be a fight to begin with. I respect all you guys.
I hope I'm not sounding like a brown noser. I just needed to say this.
Yep, using other people's tech and not giving them credit. It's the dream, really.
What he said ^ Honestly, it's really helped to educate and enlighten quite a few people, myself included so any posts from you guys have not been wasted.
Ragingnight
Member
"but fighting games have no stories, how can it cost so much for such barebone gaming?"
"but but how come they don't add everybody in mvc2 into mvc3! capcom going to dlc nickel and dime us for things that SHOULD be in the game".
I hear these phrases regularly and sometime by my friends. Lets just say I tell them to shutup and stop being stupid.
"but but how come they don't add everybody in mvc2 into mvc3! capcom going to dlc nickel and dime us for things that SHOULD be in the game".
I hear these phrases regularly and sometime by my friends. Lets just say I tell them to shutup and stop being stupid.
Oldschoolgamer
The physical form of blasphemy
Personally, I think MvC3 is a horrible example, but your point is clear.
Okay, then please do.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
I literally read this one time: "Street Fighter IV could have been 2D if Capcom cared. It did't cost anything to make with cheap 3D graphics because the characters were already designed in SF2."
The problem is people like you, who totally deserve your bans, speaking like you know anything at all, refusing to believe that the people who work in that industry might actually know what they're talking about when they talk about how that industry works.
Ragingnight
Member
"Why doesn't capcom make SNK vs Capcom vs marvel ? They already have the characters".
I got that one too. "why can't they make the best fighting game with 100+ characters, nope they just want to make super ultimate fighter 6"
ViewtifulJC
Banned
What's taking Nintendo so long with the new Smash? I mean, they already have all the damn characters made in other games.