Support NeoGAF

[Blackface]

I know that been playing since the realm and beta testing UO .

However you can't compare a single player game and TOR . The games you talk of that are 12hr and cost $50m also have cutting edge graphics in which tons of money were spent on a new engine and tons of money were spent on animation and texture assets.

Tor on the other hand is using an engine that was already made for mmorpgs and they are targeting very old standards for graphics with a ton of repeating textures htrough out everything.

The engine cost millions of dollars to license. They may not have created it, but most games don't. Most games re-use existing engines created by specific companies. At most they make minor tweaks to it.

SWTOR has a specific art style. It's not trying to go with realistic "cutting-edge" graphics because MMORPG"s simply can't do something like that. That being said, SWTOR will probably have 100 times the art assets of a typical single player game. Everything is SWTOR is being hand-made. Nothing is randomly generated. They have done developers videos about this topic already. Every box, tree, and texture you see was manually added by artists. Considering a single planet in is the size of 8 zones in WoW, and 8 zones in WoW are larger they any single player game in terms of sheer size, it takes a huge amount of work.

Toy story has big actors that command millions of dollars for their voice work. SW TOR has the ability to use actors on scale and even employees. I'm sure you can have joe blow record 100 hours of dialogue and still not come anywhere close to what tom hank made for toy story 2

Voice acting isn't as expensive as you believe it is. Its very cheap actually. No name voice talent is paid just hundreds of dollars an hour of footage. Even at $1k an hour of dialogue for this game your looking at only $100k per 100 hrs of footage. So how many hours do we think they recorded ? 500 hrs ? Thats only 500k . How about 1,000 hours thats still only 1m .

Remember thats with no name voice actors making 1k for an hours work for some reason.

I'd be surprised if they even hit 5m in terms of voice acting costs

This was pretty damn embarrising. You have no idea how much voice over work costs for things like video-games and movies. For example

" According to Screen Actors Guild rules, union voice actors can expect to be paid $760 for one four-hour recording session.

That’s just the fee for a professional voice actor with union status.

Now, if you were to talk celebrity voice talent, that figure increases exponentially. Speaking to Reuters, Blindlight production company general manager Lev Chapelsky said that some stars have demanded $750,000 for an hour’s worth of work, and one voice actor actually received $500,000 for a single session. Chapelsky told Reuters that top talent commonly receives “in the high five figures for a single session.”"

You can also read here about the sheer amount of money handed out for video-game specific work

http://www.voiceovertimes.com/2008/02/02/actors-score-500k-for-video-game-voice-overs/

You also need to keep in mind, Bioware is going to be hiring known voice-actors for SWTOR. Much like they did for all of their other voice acted games.

Mass Effect 2 alone had 90 voice actors (and a number of voice-acting celebrities) and over 25,000 lines of dialogue. ME2 will be very small compared to swtor.

Voice acting is so expensive then analysts have gone on record wondering how Bioware is going to possible financially sustain a game like SWTOR. Considering it will need new voice work for each content patch. There has even been a rumour that users will pay for content patches.

Thats just the money voice actors make. You aren't considering the huge cost associated with the producers and audio engineers. The studio costs or the money and time it takes implementing it in-game. It's huge. Bioware has stated themselves is the largest undertaking they have ever been a part of.

The notion you could get 1000 hours of dialogue for 1 million is hilarious.

 

[legend166]

I guess it's less than I thought


Well, I was pretty close like in the ballpark...


hmm who to believe.

I don't know about $300 million, but $80 million just seems way too low. From the looks of it, Pachter has just gone 200 developers X four years X $100k (salary + overhead for each employee) = $80 million.

That link I posted earlier made it sound like much more than $100 million. The EA exec said that's what Blizzard spent on WoW in 2004. And that TOR will be EA's biggest project ever. After all that, they are only spending what Blizzard did back in 2004? With a fully voice acted MMO?

Nah.

 

[eastmen]

The engine cost millions of dollars to license. They may not have created it, but most games don't. Most games re-use existing engines created by specific companies. At most they make minor tweaks to it.

SWTOR has a specific art style. It's not trying to go with realistic "cutting-edge" graphics because MMORPG"s simply can't do something like that. That being said, SWTOR will probably have 100 times the art assets of a typical single player game. Everything is SWTOR is being hand-made. Nothing is randomly generated. They have done developers videos about this topic already. Every box, tree, and texture you see was manually added by artists. Considering a single planet in is the size of 8 zones in WoW, and 8 zones in WoW are larger they any single player game in terms of sheer size, it takes a huge amount of work.

Gears of war only cost epic 10m . Brand new game for a brand new platform.

Also the hero engine will command less money than other multiplatlform engines because its not very popular.

Tor's art style is simple . A mmorpg can surely go with cutting edge graphics , they have done it multiple times in the past. The fact remains that Tor is targting hardware from 9 years ago. In fact by going with the dx 9 api its targting the same level of hardware as wow targeted. Why would its budget be more ? If anything the cost to produce games of that graphical quality would have only gone down over the last decade

This was pretty damn embarrising. You have no idea how much voice over work costs for things like video-games and movies. For example

" According to Screen Actors Guild rules, union voice actors can expect to be paid $760 for one four-hour recording session.

That’s just the fee for a professional voice actor with union status.

Now, if you were to talk celebrity voice talent, that figure increases exponentially. Speaking to Reuters, Blindlight production company general manager Lev Chapelsky said that some stars have demanded $750,000 for an hour’s worth of work, and one voice actor actually received $500,000 for a single session. Chapelsky told Reuters that top talent commonly receives “in the high five figures for a single session.”"

You can also read here about the sheer amount of money handed out for video-game specific work

http://www.voiceovertimes.com/2008/02/02/actors-score-500k-for-video-game-voice-overs/

You also need to keep in mind, Bioware is going to be hiring known voice-actors for SWTOR. Much like they did for all of their other voice acted games.

Mass Effect 2 alone had 90 voice actors (and a number of voice-acting celebrities) and over 25,000 lines of dialogue. ME2 will be very small compared to swtor.

Voice acting is so expensive then analysts have gone on record wondering how Bioware is going to possible financially sustain a game like SWTOR. Considering it will need new voice work for each content patch. There has even been a rumour that users will pay for content patches.

Thats just the money voice actors make. You aren't considering the huge cost associated with the producers and audio engineers. The studio costs or the money and time it takes implementing it in-game. It's huge. Bioware has stated themselves is the largest undertaking they have ever been a part of.

The notion you could get 1000 hours of dialogue for 1 million is hilarious.

Why you just listed it for me

4 hours of voice dialogue is $750 dollars . 100 /4 = 25x750 = $18,750 . Way less than I said above . 1,000 /4 = 250x750= 187,500


So for 1,000 hours acording to the screen actor guild would only cost $187,500 dollars


Unless your sugesting that every character in this game is voiced by A level voice actors commanding 750 thousand or more per session i fail to see how I'm wrong in the slightest.


Even if bioware hires 4 actors of massive popularity that command $1m each for a 4 hour session they would still come in at under 10m for recording their voice over for the game


Now I know that during that 4 hour session they aren't going to get 4 hours of dialogue , prob about 1hour . But the point is its still cheap to record voice over work unless your going to with huge stars for it and i doubt random quest giver 100 is going to have Tom Hanks doing his voice work.

 

[eastmen]

I don't know about $300 million, but $80 million just seems way too low. From the looks of it, Pachter has just gone 200 developers X four years X $100k (salary + overhead for each employee) = $80 million.

That link I posted earlier made it sound like much more than $100 million. The EA exec said that's what Blizzard spent on WoW in 2004. And that TOR will be EA's biggest project ever. After all that, they are only spending what Blizzard did back in 2004? With a fully voice acted MMO?

Nah.

Like i asked the other poster what have they done that would make it cost more ? If anything the cost of developing dx 9 level graphics have gone down over the last decade . Remember for blizzard they designed a game around dx8 and dx 9 both were 4/2 years old. Dx 9 is almost 10 years old at this point in time . Costs would have only gone down as tools have become better and engines have become more mature.

Bioware is using a liscensed engine while wow had to heavly modify the warcraft 3 engine from what i understand

The other thing is voice over work and as the one poster said its $750 bucks for a 4 hour voice session. Even if you only get 1 hour of usable dialogue from that , its still cheap and wont cost 10s of millions of dollars for it.

Then you have to remember the time frame. For the first year or two they wouldn't have had any where near the amount of workers on the game as they would in the last two years.

 

[sam27368]

Is there a heirachy of game development costs in terms of what it takes?

In terms of higher cost to lower cost

e.g

1. Manpower
2. Licensed Software
3. Server Running Costs (to host the game dev, not for MMOs)

Be interested in seeing what actually takes the biggest chunk of money