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Marathon game credits list 2,752 people, including support from Valkyrie Entertainment or PS Creative Arts
That money was lost the day they signed those damned papers...
Guardian Monkey
Member
Quick calculation here, 2,752 x 1000000 =2 752 000 billion dollars.
Every employee gets $1m?
Forsete
Member
At least.
Unknown Soldier
Banned
I mean, yes? If your average salary per employee is $150,000 (this is LOW for software devs on the US West Coast), and the game took 8 years to make
Each employee really did get $1.2M during the game's development...
One of the biggest reasons, if not THE biggest reason, why game budgets in East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea) haven't inflated the way Western game budgets have is simply that Western studios have to pay their staff multiples what the Eastern studios are paying
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Guardian Monkey
Member
The core group was 300 over 3-4 years. Reread the article and you know why so many are listed.
Unknown Soldier
Banned
Okay, so 300 over 3-4 years, let's completely lowball it and pretend you only get paid $150k to develop software in Bellevue WA (reality is much higher)
300 x 4 x 150,000 = $180 million
Each developer received 4 x $150,000 = $600,000 over the 4 years dev cycle
That's ONLY salaries of the devteam, and we're pretending they only got paid $150k (it's much more)
My spitball take earlier in this thread regarding the budget of Marathon is likely dead on
ViciousAgenda
Member
I heard they made dolphins work on it for 16 hours a day.
Guardian Monkey
Member
Bungie Software Engineer Salaries (20 Salaries submitted)
Glassdoorhttps://www.glassdoor.com › Salary › Bungie-Software-...
The estimated average salary for a Software Engineer at Bungie is $148,711 per year or $71 per hour, but some professionals have reported earning up to roughly
I'm not shocked if it was $300 million game but it's not over 1 billion like Mr quick math there.
Unknown Soldier
Banned
Yeah the $1 billion thing was kinda silly, though I also heard rumors the budget of GTA6 is rapidly approaching the $1B mark after all the delays.....
I was more or less just demonstrating the math in my own previous post that it had a $250 million budget (rumored) but that $200 million of it was salaries
Also my salary guess ended up being dead on too. Bungie devs are underpaid compared to average Microsoft devs next door which was what I was thinking about
Anyways the takeaway from all this is that Western AAA game development is simply unsustainable with these kinds of team sizes and salaries, something is going to have to give because even if Marathon had not flopped, it would have needed to make an insane amount of money to make back the vast initial investment needed to make it and most of that investment is just salaries for the huge devteams
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Black_Stride
do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Yeah and I dont get why it needed that many people.....more than Ratchet and Clank more than Sackboy BA........
geary
Member
Susie has to be paid, and is paid from the profit that Marathon does.
With what money are paid the rest of 70% of people not in the core team?
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Hawking Radiation
Wants to watch an Event Horizon porno
Imagine that sort of workforce on a AAA title from one of the big PS studios.
schaft0620
Member
I wonder if this game was entirely contracted out with support from Bungie, while Bungie works on D3. Then you have to include all support and operational staff at Bungie and SIE?
Crunchbox
Member
I cant stop playing it lol. Its so good man.
genesisblock
Member
Just think, GTA V was probably made in less than half the amount to make this game.
yurinka
Member
Because despite being smaller than the mainline Spider-Man games, it's still a AAA open world game, way bigger and more complex than these other two.
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Black_Stride
do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
It was a stand alone expansion of an already established game, a vast majority of the assets were reused.
I imagine most of the underlying logic was reused.
The engine didnt need to be heavily reworked.
R&C should have been a much greater technical endeavor.
What were all those people doing?
spons
Gold Member
Imagine this game flops. And imagine you're Hermen Hulst, stumbling into a room with multiple high-ranking Japanese businessmen who's entire life is their fucking company, Sony, and having to explain you've burned half a billion on something. There's no way in hell Bungie will make it through this. I'm giving them less than a month if it doesn't rake in enough engagement.
Make no mistake here, Hermen's ego reaches beyond time and space, and that's coming from his fellow countrymen. Bungie will be his collateral when he's given the boot.
Make no mistake here, Hermen's ego reaches beyond time and space, and that's coming from his fellow countrymen. Bungie will be his collateral when he's given the boot.
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yurinka
Member
They were doing a fuck ton of work that wasn't reused either in the gamedev side, or in all the non-gamedev areas (market research, product planning, publishing, marketing, legal, QA, PR, HR, etc) that need to be done for any release, even if it's a remaster with minimal changes.
To make games is very complex, hard and requires a ton of work in a ton of areas. If you go to check the game credits of a AAA game you'll see it.
These Japanese businessmen promoted Hermen like a couple years ago, pretty likely for having aprox. doubled the first party games revenue and having noticiably increased first party game profitability mostly thanks to the GaaS+Off-PS expansions, which apparently achieved their revenue goal almost a year ahead of schedule, even before releasing half of the GaaS under development.
While also having aprox. doubled their manpower, increased the amount of gamedev teams / projects under development to all time records, despite having made (in some case needed since decades ago) restructurings with layoffs to optimize costs getting rid of underperforming, unprofitable people or teams.
In case of Bungie, part of its post acquisition restructuring was agreed in the acquisition, and part was made because was needed to fix issues they had. Destiny 2 worked well for being an old sunseting game but performed a bit worse than they originally expected.
TeamLFG looked promising enough for them to complete the incubation and turn it a new studio. Destiny Rising had a very successful launch. Marathon had isses but with the changes it got fixed and they released a great game that finally launched, and so far apparently isn't a hit but isn't a Concord either. Seems to be a just ok release that I assume will be able to improve with post launch additions, improvements and fixes.
When acquired they mentioned that they were working in off-gaming adaptations of the Bungie IPs, that would be benefited from the acquisition. I assume won't take long to be announced, maybe a year or two. In the gamedev side, now having shipped Marathon they'll focus on postlaunch support of Marathon, Destiny 2 and Destiny Rising, with another team focusing on their next game release. Which assume will be Destiny 3, while before that TeamLFG releases their first game I assume next year.
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ANIMAL1975
Member
I delivered pizzas to bungie for some time during production.
My pizzas were always hot and crispy like no one elses and they f ing knewit.... and it got me in the credits, logistics, Whitemale Pizzaguy ( i told the blue hair weirdo that came talk to me and ask permission my name was Ima Whitemale Pizzaguy Iuweirdo Mofo) lolz
PeteBull
Gold Member
That could have happened if game didnt flop, now it will more look like this among bungie devs:At least.
Kokoloko85
Member
You really think this many people worked on it for 6 years
PeteBull
Gold Member
If we lowbail it at 500 its still incredibly expensive AAA game, 250m usd of production budget, who knows how much more including marketting budget which defo wasnt low, 400-500m maybe?
And those ppl still working at the studio, since its gaas game so not like singleplayer one when its one and done(+bugfixes and maybe if its really successful one or two expacks), bungie gonna have to keep likely skeleton crew of 100+ all the time if they got roadmap/new seasons/all kinds of updates.
If they only keep it alive with minimal crew maybe they can downsize to 30ppl? Still those 30ppl will require at least some reasonable ccu for it to be worth it, maybe 30k 24h peak or so.
Edit: Just for comparision destiny 2 had 61k 24h ccu peak not even 3 months ago, 13th december(now its in the gutter with 11k 24h ccu).
Now lets see how many days/weeks will marathon need to get only 61k 24h ccu, it will definitely happen in march still so under 1 month after launch while to be fair and comparing it to previous bungie project- aka destiny 2 it took much longer( oct 2019 launch, 60,8k 24h peak first time recorded only in november 2022 aka over 3 years after launch, after that game bounced back many times too).
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yurinka
Member
As happens in AAA games, the lead dev team is only a small percentage (typically around 10%) of the people who works in the game.
Most of the manpower are in external support teams, internal at Sony or outsourcing teams.
And then a big chunk are in non-development areas (management/finances, publishing, marketing, PR, HR, legal, IT, etc), which in this game got duplied because started as game to be funded and published by Bungie but later after acquisitions most of these roles were moved to SIE/PS Studios who has its own equivalent for these non-gamedev roles, so credited both sides even if many of that people only worked in a portion of the project.
In addition to this, the development of the game got rebooted several years ago, meaning pretty likely some people got fired and replaced. Meaning, for their position these two persons are credited but didn't work for the whole period of time that a person in that position normally works in a project.
See above: https://www.neogaf.com/threads/mara...nt-or-ps-creative-arts.1694322/post-271350165
I'd say around $250M for everything: development of the game + season 1, servers of season 1, marketing, publishing, etc.
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PeteBull
Gold Member
And i say since its western veteran studio with hundreds of employes and game took many (4-5 at least, could be even 7)years, suffered multiple delays and had tons of very expensive marketting for well over half a year, its way way more than that.
Now lets look at the publisher who is funding it- they spent those 400-500m usd over the years, so they not only want to make that cash back, they wanna make at least 2x of that, and preferably durning launch window, otherwise instead of sinking that money into gamedev they would just put it into bank/do safe stock options, buy gold/silver/platinum or chose other super safe way with 99,9% safety(u never have 100% safety obviously).
Solarstrike
Member
yurinka
Member
Lol, they didn't spend $400-500M in this game at all. It's pretty likely in the $200-300M ballpark, everything included (full development, marketing & communications, publishing, season 1 servers and season 1 post launch content).
Pretty likely even less, in the $175-$250M ballpark, because a good chunk of the people there only worked on a portion of the game (Bungie devs fired particularly when it got rebooted, Bungie non-gamedev staff that got replaced with central SIE/PS Studios staff who do that role for all PS Studios releases, SIE/PS Studios people who got on board around half of the development).
And considering many paid GaaS get more revenue from addons than from buying the game, even if this one generates aprox. the same gith game sales and addons will only need to sell somewhere around 3-5M units and having a pretty good user retention to make it profitable.
As I remember the development of this game started between Bungie broke their relationship with Activision and the covid. So has has been around 6-7 years or development including preproduction and the part that got rebooted.
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