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[senj]

How is $10k a month low?

For a developer? The $10k number is salary + benefits + payroll taxes + overhead. If you have experience as a developer you could make $10k a month in just salary pretty easily -- that's only $120K a year. When you factor in benefits, payroll taxes, overhead etc the average total overhead of a developer at a company like Google is closer to $20k a month.

But the $10K number is the average across everyone from devs to minimum wage QA interns. So the dev number in the game industry is probably > $10k whereas the number for other groups is probably lower.

 

[Memento]

It would do you both a lot of good if you read the actual article and understood where the $10k/month comes from.

Hint: It's not just their wage.

Also, a theoretical $120k per year is not low at all, even given their education requirements.

Read the thread. It's been explained.

Poverty wages??? Yes they could make more if they got into another industry but come on. There are people with just as much schooling who make less.



Read the article. $10k isn't just the cost of salary.

I know that. I am replying to the guy that said $10k a month is low (I believe he thinks that would be the salary).

 

[Wozman23]

So there are two questions: How do you make more money? Or how do you make games cheaper?

I'm not savvy on the industry, but there are a few options.

1. The American capitalist would probably say you have to find a way to reduce that 10k/person number - cheaper labor, less benefits, outsourcing, dodging taxes... But doing that really only lessens your product if you aren't attracting quality workers and burn out the only quality workers that you do get. Plus, the easier cuts could come from the top, where the top executives at publishers and developers are already making way over comfortable living wages.

2. The price of a game can go up. In most cases it already sneakily has through DLC and microtransactions. Consumers won't be happy, especially if the newer, predatory business models like microtransactions don't disappear in conjunction.

3. You look for ways to cut the non-payroll portion of budgets.

Marketing could probably be less reliant on old forms of media, like expensive TV commercials, and instead favor social media. With that, you could essentially pay a single PR person/community manager to post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube...

Or you make games cheaper, by reducing scope, scale, or graphical fidelity.

As much as I enjoy really great looking games like Uncharted, smaller stuff like Hellblade or dozens of indies are just as impressive. Maybe we don't need to be constantly chasing higher pixel counts. Maybe we draw the line at 1080p. Maybe we stop focusing so much on photorealism, and start favoring stylized graphics. There are some really impressive cell shaded and low poly games like Sly Cooper and Grow Home. Maybe we don't need worlds that you can spend hundreds of hours in. One of my favorite games, 140, can be beat in 30 minutes.

Setting a technological ceiling for games and finding ways to reduce marketing costs would be my choice, but we'll probably just go with the tried-and-true method of dicking over consumers or employees.

 

[Stallion Dan]

This is why delaying games that aren't really ready is less popular than crunch time.

Imagine your studio is 40 people.
You delay by a month.
Each person costs about 10k per month.

Suddenly you need to come up with 400k more to keep your people paid.

If you're struggling already, that ain't easy.

But unless you're not paying overtime, X more hours needed is X more hours, regardless if it crunch or a delay.

 

[WestEgg]

Speaking of ROI, I've actually put a lot of thought into just how much money Breath of the Wild likely made Nintendo. Like other people have said, Shigeru Miyamoto had said Zelda needed to make 2 million sales to be profitable. Easily done (I'm guessing the combined total of Switch and Wii U SKUs are at 4.5 million give or take, and this games gonna have legs).

But then there was the collector's edition for $100, which came with additional swag (case, CD, coin, map). And the Even More Collecter's Edition that came with a Master Sword Statue for $130.

Then we have the Breath of the Wild merch that is still all over GameStop and Think Geek. Everything from shirts, game cases, puzzles, toys, etc.

This has likely had a knock on effect for existing Zelda products as well, so that foam Wind Waker sword, that Zelda Monopoly set, probably even other games in the series all likely see a boost from Breath of the Wild sales.

And let's not forget the Zelda Symphony, which has been touring on multiple legs since 2012, shows no signs of stopping, and always sells out.

Without even getting into how Zelda likely is the key reason the Switch exploded the way it did, it just boggles my mind how impactful this one game was.

And Mario and Pokemon will probably do even better!

 

[senj]

But unless you're not paying overtime, X more hours needed is X more hours, regardless if it crunch or a delay.

Pretty much no software company, games or otherwise, pays overtime.

 

[10k]

Holy hell @ $10K a person per month on avg. thinking of all the games that took 3+ years with 100s working on them o_o

10K per person seems really low to me. I guess there are a lot of underpaid developers out there.

That $10k a month isn't just for their salary, it's all costs involved like rent, and equipment and all that stuff.

Things like voice actors and marketing cost a lot of money too. I'd be interested to see the financial breakdown of some of these games. How much dev cost vs everything else.

In what universe is 10k per month really low?

I feel so popular today.

 

[gogosox82]

It would do you both a lot of good if you read the actual article and understood where the $10k/month comes from.

Hint: It's not just their wage.

Also, a theoretical $120k per year is not low at all, even given their education requirements.

I did read it and I stand by what I said. Devs work insane hours and get paid very little when compared to their peers who work much lower hours and nearly double their salary.

 

[NoPiece]

For extremely popular games like GTA 5, those costs are made up in the first few days of sales so I don't think the industry is in crisis of imploding because of the high cost to make games.

It isn't safe to extrapolate the health of the industry by looking at one title, which happens to be one of the most successful of all time. For every GTA 5 there are scores of games like Prey, Agents of Mayhem, or LawBreakers. It is a hit-driven business, and most games lose money.

 

[kswiston]

I did read it and I stand by what I said. Devs work insane hours and get paid very little when compared to their peers who work much lower hours and nearly double their salary.

No doubt that software engineers and programmers could make more elsewhere, but does that apply for the artists, level designers, etc? Basically anyone in game development lacking a comp sci background?

I have no idea what digital artists/modellers make in other fields.

 

[Ravidrath]

BTW, the $10k / man month figure is likely higher at most AAA studios.

Probably more like $15-20k.

Indivisible is budgeted at $10k/man-month, and it's pretty tight.

Overhead, legal costs, benefits, rent, parking, etc. on top of salaries all add up very quickly, and no one at Lab Zero is even making "average" salaries for their role / experience.

 

[Niceguydan8]

I did read it and I stand by what I said. Devs work insane hours and get paid very little when compared to their peers who work much lower hours and nearly double their salary.

Saying they make little in comparison to other fields is vastly different than saying they make "poverty wages." The poverty line is nowhere near what most developers make. I think that's just tasteless hyperbole.

 

[nynt9]

No doubt that software engineers and programmers could make more elsewhere, but does that apply for the artists, level designers, etc? Basically anyone in game development lacking a comp sci background?

I have no idea what digital artists/modellers make in other fields.

We know that applies to voice actors as well, thanks to the strike. Voice actors in other media get more benefits, better wages, more rights and less strain. The game industry is just a meat grinder.

BTW, the $10k / man month figure is likely higher at most AAA studios.

Probably more like $15-20k.

Indivisible is budgeted at $10k/man-month, and it's pretty tight.

Overhead, legal costs, benefits, rent, parking, etc. on top of salaries all add up very quickly, and no one at the studio is even making "average" salaries for their role / experience.

According to some posters in this thread you're spoiled and living it up! Work from your basement with no health care or legal protection and for a tenth or the salary and you could have reduced the Kickstarter cost so much more! /S

 

[Shpeshal Nick]

If you don't want devs going out of business all the time, stop demanding so many fucking Ps and high res textures people.

 

[originalshez]

I wonder if Neil Druckman is reading this and laughing at all the comments/extrapolations

 

[Ravidrath]

Work from your basement with no health care or legal protection and for a tenth or the salary and you could have reduced the Kickstarter cost so much more! /S

You kid, but we did that with the Skullgirls crowdfunding and it wasn't sustainable. Everyone had to take on additional work to make ends meet and that lead to further delays.

 

[Makonero]

Pretty much no software company, games or otherwise, pays overtime.

CD Projekt Red, as noted in Shreier's book, is forced to due to Polish law.

 

[qa_engineer]

Marketing and sheer number of qualified software engineers, sound engineers, artist, writers, product managers, and testers required to put out a complex piece of software.

 

[TVexperto]

its a great book, everyone interested in bts stuff in game development should read it

I ordered it on amazon.de but it says not available with no estimated date

 

[kiguel182]

Qualified people are expensive and big video games use a lot of them. It's not hard to understand.

 

[LordofPwn]

and this is why games have been trying to offer more ways for people to give them money. It's been over 10 years with AAA games costing $60 at retail. Publishers are afraid to raise the cost because people might bawk and walk. so they keep prices the same and offer MTs, and DLCs. if your game has 200 people working on it for 3 years you probably have a budget of just over $100M including marketing. so you'll need to sell like 3 million copies to make a profit.

Probably a good reason as to why Valve stopped making games and started selling them instead.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

The comment in the article about big games with multiple studios or thousands of credits like Assassin's Creed feels like it may not be strictly accurate as not all 1000 Ubisoft personnel who get credited were working constantly on that game over the 3 year development cycle. My understanding was that people were pretty mobile on projects there and might be working on several different titles in a year depending on what their role was.

 

[senj]

CD Projekt Red, as noted in Shreier's book, is forced to due to Polish law.

Ah, yeah, to clarify, in North America. Europe tends to be better about providing overtime pay to salaried positions.

 

[Halabane]

Here is some loaded labor rates for tech people:
https://www.accenture.com/t20170306...media/PDF-45/Accenture-Loaded-Labor-Rates.pdf

10k is dirt cheap. Salary is usually around 60-65% of the loaded rate. The rest is overhead. Though in this case it might be higher since this is internal development and there is no other way to charge indirect costs...like infrastructure/networks, computers and licences than just the labor rates (you can charge the customer for these things separately). Then it could actually go to 1/2. So about 60k or less. Don't forget there is a coloring to this as there are lower and higher scale wages based on job, as the chart shows. Testers less...leads more.

The only thing is I doubt this is entirely done by hours. End credits usually have a lot of subcontractors. Probably they deliver by capability. So read that as subcontractors are probably supposed to deliver some subsystem of the entire game to the developer. If they have assets they can reuse then they maybe able to do it cheaper if not and it they screw up their estimate, my guess this is where the nasty overtime without pay crap comes up.

The only thing that can recolor this is actually how many hours it is. Development is not a linear function. It usually has peaks...often the expensive work is at the front (development) and the less expensive work at the end (test and fixes). How much of this labor is expensive labor...how much is lower cost labor...I don't know. But it's not linear, the hard part of running development shops of any genre is to keep all the different skill sets employed and busy. Really would be fascinating to see actual cost data.

 

[senj]

The comment in the article about big games with multiple studios or thousands of credits like Assassin's Creed feels like it may not be strictly accurate as not all 1000 Ubisoft personnel who get credited were working constantly on that game over the 3 year development cycle. My understanding was that people were pretty mobile on projects there and might be working on several different titles in a year depending on what their role was.

The thing about an average is that it's an average. 1000 people at Ubisoft might not spend all 3 years on one game, but 10k per-month-per-person-who-touches-the-game might still be a good average approximation for the budget of the game.

The people moving between projects are probably your more expensive developers and asset creators whose combined overhead is easily closer to $20k per month, and the people who spend a long time on the game might be your QA etc people, who get let go between games, and who might clock in well below $10k per month in overhead, so it could easily net out to around $10k per month per person for 3 years overall even when a significant chunk of the people involved don't actually spend 3 years on the game.

 

[nynt9]

The comment in the article about big games with multiple studios or thousands of credits like Assassin's Creed feels like it may not be strictly accurate as not all 1000 Ubisoft personnel who get credited were working constantly on that game over the 3 year development cycle. My understanding was that people were pretty mobile on projects there and might be working on several different titles in a year depending on what their role was.

Here is some loaded labor rates for tech people:
https://www.accenture.com/t20170306...media/PDF-45/Accenture-Loaded-Labor-Rates.pdf

10k is dirt cheap. Salary is usually around 60-65% of the loaded rate. The rest is overhead. Though in this case it might be higher since this is internal development and there is no other way to charge indirect costs...like infrastructure/networks, computers and licences than just the labor rates (you can charge the customer for these things separately). Then it could actually go to 1/2. So about 60k or less. Don't forget there is a coloring to this as there are lower and higher scale wages based on job, as the chart shows. Testers less...leads more.

The only thing is I doubt this is entirely done by hours. End credits usually have a lot of subcontractors. Probably they deliver by capability. So read that as subcontractors are probably supposed to deliver some subsystem of the entire game to the developer. If they have assets they can reuse then they maybe able to do it cheaper if not and it they screw up their estimate, my guess this is where the nasty overtime without pay crap comes up.

The only thing that can recolor this is actually how many hours it is. Development is not a linear function. It usually has peaks...often the expensive work is at the front (development) and the less expensive work at the end (test and fixes). How much of this labor is expensive labor...how much is lower cost labor...I don't know. But it's not linear, the hard part of running development shops of any genre is to keep all the different skill sets employed and busy. Really would be fascinating to see actual cost data.

Yeah, these are both true, which is why the industry hasn't crashed yet. But not every studio is set up to do that. This means the ballpark estimates in the article may not be super accurate for huge companies, but they also have other expenses and higher marketing budgets and whatnot.

People should realize that these rates apply to supporting games after release as well. Beyond server costs, patching games requires development and testing teams (among others) to keep working on the game, and that's quite expensive. Which is why games need to supplant post launch support with either DLC or microtransactions.

 

[SeanBoocock]

Ah, yeah, to clarify, in North America. Europe tends to be better about providing overtime pay to salaried positions.

EA does for certain classes of employees including most junior level hires for their first couple years. It was a deliberate change following the EA Spouse episode to give studios a financial incentive not to crunch teams.

 

[Some Nobody]

Shhhh, don't disrupt the "publishers are cartoonishly-evil scrooge mcducks swimming in money pools" narrative.

*sigh* The video game business has been feast or famine for years, this isn't anything new. But just because you're shit at stockpiling mountains of cash doesn't make you any less evil, it just means you're shit at the evil thing you're attempting to do.

 

[Interficium]

Or you make games cheaper, by reducing scope, scale, or graphical fidelity.

As much as I enjoy really great looking games like Uncharted, smaller stuff like Hellblade or dozens of indies are just as impressive. Maybe we don't need to be constantly chasing higher pixel counts. Maybe we draw the line at 1080p. Maybe we stop focusing so much on photorealism, and start favoring stylized graphics.

Yeah, I'm sure Gaf will be 100% on board with that.

Spoiler

/s

 

[Renmyra]

FF7 had a $100M marketing budget? Jeez.

 

[Some Nobody]

Yeah, I'm sure Gaf will be 100% on board with that.

Spoiler

/s

I disagree. I'm fine with graphics staying right where they are for a little while. Or at the very least, I'm fine not jamming resolution up to 4K just because we have it. I'd love to see what things look like on the PS5 if we were still using 64GB BDs while the system had 32GBs worth of RAM, lol.

 

[Micerider]

In large studios, I could see senior staffs spearheading pre-prod or coordinating full prod costing that much on average. But juniors and testers, who are the large population there, are probaby less than half of it, with overhead.

But it also LARGELY depends on where you recruit. Of course the coastal US big cities are going to cost. But, knowing Polish salaries well enough, a game like Witcher 3 probably works fine with a budget with 2-3k dollars average per headcount (with overhead).

And a large game scarcely have full staff all along. I wouldnt be surprised if The "several hundreds" peaks are probably only half of the dev time.

 

[B-Dubs]

Or you make games cheaper, by reducing scope, scale, or graphical fidelity.

As much as I enjoy really great looking games like Uncharted, smaller stuff like Hellblade or dozens of indies are just as impressive. Maybe we don't need to be constantly chasing higher pixel counts. Maybe we draw the line at 1080p. Maybe we stop focusing so much on photorealism, and start favoring stylized graphics. There are some really impressive cell shaded and low poly games like Sly Cooper and Grow Home. Maybe we don't need worlds that you can spend hundreds of hours in. One of my favorite games, 140, can be beat in 30 minutes.

A ton of studios went out of business in the transition to HD for this very reason. Sadly, more power and more realistic graphics is how Microsoft and Sony sell consoles so studios need to deliver on that shit. Plus it's easier to sell a prettier game than one with better AI or gameplay.

 

[Hoho for breakfast]

What is that then like 75k a year? Sounds ok until you consider the number of hours worked. Fuck that.

 

[Renekton]

Or you make games cheaper, by reducing scope, scale, or graphical fidelity.

Note that devs wouldn't increase those aspects if consumers aren't interested in them.

 

[Spuck-uk]

And people wonder why DLC is such a big thing in games now, when game prices haven't gone up since the SNES days, but development costs have absolutely skyrocketed.

 

[ramparter]

This is why delaying games that aren't really ready is less popular than crunch time.

Imagine your studio is 40 people.
You delay by a month.
Each person costs about 10k per month.

Suddenly you need to come up with 400k more to keep your people paid.

If you're struggling already, that ain't easy.

Well theres a reason games are released with bugs that are fixed later. Also thats the point of Early Access.

 

[Lady Gaia]

In large studios, I could see senior staffs spearheading pre-prod or coordinating full prod costing that much on average. But juniors and testers, who are the large population there, are probaby less than half of it, with overhead.

People who haven't run their own business often wildly underestimate overhead on a full-time employee. I was thinking $10k/month per person sounded awfully low.

And a large game scarcely have full staff all along

Now this is something I think the article fails to address meaningfully. No game involves full headcount from day one, and watching the credits for a game gives you a wildly inflated idea of who contributed meaningfully since many of the people listed are only peripherally involved.

Games are extremely expensive and risky propositions, no question, but it's nowhere near as straightforward as #ofHeads x $10k x #ofMonths.