Not as amusing as DOWN's graphics fetishism, though
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The Witcher 3's budget was $32 million (120M Zloty) plus $35 million in marketing
- Thread starter boskee
- Start date
Leafhopper
Banned
That seems to be happening with more frequency.
Maybe not in the case of stuff by EA or Ubisoft though since the amount of people that are working on some of those games is so high that paying wages will trump the marketing budget, I would think.
Inferno313
Banned
I mean the development cost is primarily spent in Poland, where talent is cheap.
The advertising costs were spent worldwide, with a big portion going towards America, where stuff is expensive.
I remember reading some article that devs usually get 15-20% cuts on each game sold. Sometimes the publisher just pays for the games development and keeps all the sales for themselves. If the former is true, then CPR probably got $36 million on day one. But I believe most publishing contracts are the latter.
The sarcasm seems a little misplaced. Even if you ignore what the difference in cost-of-living is between Poland and most other video-game-developing countries, that's a $67m budget. In the early years of the last console generation, $20m was the figure you saw thrown around a lot as a 'really high' budget for anything short of a juggernaut superfranchise.
I'd guess that's pretty common for AAA games.
perfect. lmao
soul creator
Member
teehee
thekiddfran
Member
Standard of living is lower there
ViewtifulJC
Banned
time to move all AAA game devs to Poland
wolfhowwl
Banned
The solution here is obvious: aggressively move your workforce out of high cost countries like the United States.
GAF normally doesn't react well to publishers pushing layoffs and studio closures but I think this time people will be understanding that sacrifices have to be made for the sake of more affordable budgets.
babyghost853
Member
I'll take that for companies like EA which are based in the US, but I don't think it applies for companies like UBISOFT or SquareEnix. I still believe that the main reason for out of control budgets are that the upper management are overpaid. (By upper management I mean execs.)
That and a bit of over staffing, do they really need 300+ development teams? That's already 10.5 mil just for an average salary of $35,000 over the course of a year. Granted not every dev team is 300+ strong. But it begins to put things into perspective. If you have dev teams with 300+ employes and a bunch execs making $150-200,000 a year, the numbers can only go up once marketing budgets are added.
Content =/= polish. The writing, performances and design were top notch, but it could definitely have done with more time in the oven
How so? If you're merely talking about graphics and console performance, I don't think that's enough to say it's less polished than other wrpg's.
The substantiveness of the content is arguably just as, if not more important thank dropping a few frames, especially given how fantastic CDPR is at post-release support for their titles. Console API issues will get ironed out. Having bad writing and insubstantial side-quests will not.
Do you know how many studios like Ubisoft have offices in Ukraine, Bulgaria etc?
I'm still quite surprised we don't have Ubisoft Warsaw, EA Kracow or Sony Tricity yet
gundamkyoukai
Member
In this thread a lot people don't know how wages \ rent etc etc in different countries effect budget total when converted to US currency .
poland is cheaper, but not cheap
its because loads of polish talent moves abroad for higher wages
I'm still quite surprised we don't have Ubisoft Warsaw, EA Kracow or Sony Tricity yet
its because loads of polish talent moves abroad for higher wages
I would personnally include optimisation in a product's 'polish', but appreciate it is a sliding scale. Release dates are subject to more concerns than just 'when it's done'.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it was much less polsihed than current genre contemporaries
Also didn't say polish > content, both important, and CDPR have a history of exemplary post-release support.
Edit: the game's technical issues amounted to more than just performance of course, but was perfectly playable and enjoyable for me
Felix Lighter
Member
They really took a massive gamble this time. I'm glad it paid off.
drotahorror
Member
Surprised CDPR got that kind of backing. Expected less honestly.
We really need the average salary of a junior, mid and senior software engineer in Poland compared to the various major cities in the US - SF, NY, Boston, Austin, etc.
A friend of mine who is 1 year out of college is getting close to 90k in Boston.
Though having said that, I would still assume that the average engineers salary in Poland is probably much lower than the US.
I also wonder if CD Projekt Red is able to hold onto their employees after the success of the Witcher 3, i am sure many US studios would be more than happy to arrange work visas to get in the US.
SomedayTheFire
Member
That's hugely expensive for Poland, but a polish dev where I work was telling me software debs get paid the equivalent of doctors there, but that's still 2k a month tops.
If this is wrong, let me know just relaying what I've heard. this guy is an experienced dev too, not a grad.
If this is wrong, let me know just relaying what I've heard. this guy is an experienced dev too, not a grad.
Remember that the marketing budget was (mostly) paid by investors, Microsoft, etc.
P.S. info from 2013: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=586441
"TW3 will cost at least 110 000 000 PLN (34 000 000 USD), out of that 40 000 000 PLN is for production and is paid by CDPR, and marketing budget (25 000 000 USD) will be paid by distributors and publishers in advance and deduced from the copies they sell."
Marketing expenditure incurred by our distributors will not be our costs, but will be deducted from revenues due to us from the sale of the game - says Adam Kicinski.
P.S. info from 2013: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=586441
"TW3 will cost at least 110 000 000 PLN (34 000 000 USD), out of that 40 000 000 PLN is for production and is paid by CDPR, and marketing budget (25 000 000 USD) will be paid by distributors and publishers in advance and deduced from the copies they sell."
Marketing expenditure incurred by our distributors will not be our costs, but will be deducted from revenues due to us from the sale of the game - says Adam Kicinski.
Its insane.
It doesn't matter what EA or rockstar spends on their games.
In the context of CDPR,this is very much a destiny-level project.
Graphics Horse
Member
Ubisoft have 2 in China.
Goodacre0081
Member
$35million in marketing and none of it influenced my purchase. peer reviews, past games, and gameplay clips did
Felix Lighter
Member
I'm not surprised by the marketing. The Witcher is not a globally recognized property, this is the 3rd game in the series , it is primarily a PC series until now and while the budget isn't breaking records, it is still a large budget even today. Maybe not compared to what they've created, an enormous open world RPG but still high. The game needed marketing desperately to get the word out, especially on these new platforms.
m_shortpants
Member
I guess there comes a point where the ROI on marketing makes the entire venture profitable.
I'm sure they've crunched the numbers.
well,
"inhumane crunch going on for years".
finding out about this, gotta say I'm not ok with supporting cdproject. was planning on buying w3, but these things matter to me.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
.... are you honestly Concern Trolling over a non-issue?
outunderthestars
Banned
Well they have to market the game in expensive media markets......
The average wage as of january 2015 is 3942,78pln brutto, that makes around 2800pln without taxes. Keep in mind that this is average wage, unfortunately the majority of Poles earn way less than that because the minimum wage is 1750pln brutto.
As for IT and tech related jobs, the average is ofcourse way higher, but still not as high as for other EU countries. I've read comments on CDPR's goldenline profile aswell as Polish socialmedia sites that the average wage at their studio leaves a bit to be desired, the bare minimum is supposed to be 3800pln without taxes(obviously it differs alot based on length of employment, position, experience, etc.). Way back in 2013 the Polish gamedev community published an infographic based on data from 339 developers in Poland, the average wage back then was 4458pln netto:
http://i.imgur.com/mwok9UJ.png
*edit*
here's their Goldenline profile and what a handful of former and current employees wrote about working there:
http://www.goldenline.pl/firma/cd-projekt-red/opinie
Masterbrew
Member
That is pretty depressing to read. It's kinda surprising they were able to put out such a high quality title with such disgruntled workers.
Goodacre0081
Member
I find it hard to believe they sold more via marketing than word of mouth from core gamers.
Good for you. But there's a whole nother world out there outside GAF that doesn't follow gaming as closely as we do. These are the people that will make up the bulk of the potential sales, and who big marketing budgets are *justifiably* spent on targeting.
Honestly, if you can afford to spend money to market your game, you should always do it.
The regular staff contribute a larger portion to the budget than the handful of execs.
Let's taking The Witcher 3 as an example.
If they were employed in the US (where the average wage for the industry is ~80K), with the amount of staff they have (~300), employee wages alone would cost 24 million a year.
Now let's say there are 10 execs making 200K (the high end of your expectation). That only amounts to 2 million a year.
And the wage of the employee isn't the only cost to the employer. Staff has various benefits, medical insurance and additional employer taxes for employing someone.
People are expensive.
Omnistalgic
Member
Do we even know how much Destiny cost? We just have this 500 million figure that everyone keeps quoting when it clearly was talking about multiple games/expansions/etc...
Well yes, it's bound to happen when your development budget is affected by lower salaries in Poland...
... and marketing isn't