Hey guys i have some questions about expenses in development:
What is typical or average cost of IOS project developed by two man team (outsourcing) (not including Unity licenses and Macs)?
There was one article that pointed out cost arround 40.000$ for IOS project cost, if that is true how do developers really gain this profit back from game sales, considering that average sale rate of IOS game is very low?
That question is impossible to answer. The total cost to develop a game could be anywhere from $0 to several million. The platform is irrelevant.
And there are many companies who survive solely on mobile sales. While its a crowded market with low expected costs/unit, the market is more successful than you might think.
You have to be REALLY careful if you outsource your entire project .
Lets say you want me to create RPG Y for you , I go ahead make it and you pay me . I then find another customer, make him RPG X , and I might even make RPG Z for myself .
It’ll be very hard, if not impossible to stop this . It might be better to have different people who are working for YOU but not working directly together , work on different parts of the game . Then you retain control of the project at all times .
The average cost is the sum of 2 men’s average wage per year from whatever country you are from + expenses (computer hardware, software, server/website hosting cost, advertising and promotion event) x how many years it takes to finish the project.
As you can see, this means it can vary very widely from country to country (due to living cost), and project to project (depending on the complexity of the project). So, if you live in a high income country where standard cost of living is very high, that’s going to have huge impact on your overall project cost.
As for question 2, is that $40000 dollars or $40 dollars? Why do many people use full stop in their number instead of comma??!?!?!? It’s very confusing. 
$40,000 sounds reasonable. I have read people throwing the number of $30,000 to $100,000 before (again, taking in the cost of (x employee’s salary + expense) x years).
It’s not remotely hard, and it happens all of the time. You work with experienced, trustworthy developers with a track record. Yes, if you hire someone on the Unity forums simply on the basis that he sends you a PM saying “I r do good project 4 u. I mke you gr8 game, srsly.” then you probably will find it impossible to prevent, but all kinds of projects get made like this - from individuals to large studios outsourcing the entire project to a particular developer.
I would assume that the OP resides in Europe. In mainland Europe (ie: not including the UK) the full stop character is always used to delimit thousands, millions, etc in the same way that the comma is in UK, America and elsewhere.
In most cases, at least in the US, it’s not only impossible, it’s also perfectly legal for them to do so. After all, they did write the code, and they do own the copyright for it. The only time this is not the case, is when the person can be shown to be a direct employee - then the copyright falls to the employer (“work for hire”). Otherwise, it’s your game, but their code. (this is assuming they created the whole work - if they’ve contributed only part of the work, then you can execute a ‘work for hire’ agreement, and retain copyright).
See this link for clarification: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf
Except 99%* of contracts have a clause ensuring that the entity paying for the work owns the code.
I suppose it’s possible to reassign the copyright, but it’s not automatic, and definitely the author is the holder, and does retain some rights in any case. I would talk to an attorney who is knowledgeable on this subject before going down any the route of hiring someone to deliver an entire game.
Yes, just because you are employing someone it doesn’t mean you own the copyright, however that doesn’t prevent the copyright from being transferred. That’s the point, most contracts will require that the copyright is transferred as part of the contract.
EDIT: That said i guess in the indie games development space such clauses might not be as common so its a good thing to remind people.
I would personally find the granting of exclusive distribution rights to the whole work a much more palatable agreement than a direct transfer of the copyrighted code, which could include things such as standard routines, or helper classes that I would wish to continue using. Though I believe the courts have been somewhat inconclusive on this, I’d hate to wind up there because I used a routine from one of my common libraries.
How many people are working on the project, what is the scope of the project. If its a 2 man team of 6 months then 40k is only 3.3k per month which I think would be okay but maybe someone would want at least 5k a month so its a smaller project. At least if its your own project you can put as many hours as you need to, I dont think you make a project that would take anything less at this point in the app store life cycle and have it be worth anything. I guess you could get more bang for your buck if you went with third worlders.
If you approach the problem with this angle you lost upfront at outsourcing.
If you can, hiring a whole team is better unless you are experienced at leading a remote workforce team because the overhead of communication and getting the vision to pretend to be one when you have X microvisions is not a small one.
Also there are things called contract to prevent exactly this kind of things, all you have to ensure is that you don’t outsource to the asian - indian - russian part of the globe as your contracts and rights are worth less than your toilet paper in that situation, so you can really only do it if you have a well established and trustworthy business relationship already.
But if you don’t try to use outsource as a meaning to ripp off people and ‘get it all for $0’, you normally will never have problems. This directly is related to the good old speaking ‘you get what you pay for’, cheapsaking freeriding never gonna get ya much aside of trouble
The cost above of $40k sounds reasonable at least for very small projects that can be pulled in 8-12 man months. Just be aware that the project at this cost level pretty likely is not gonna be a 40h/week work anymore, more like 60-80h a week to get everything done as a polished project even when ‘small’ is a matter of 2000-5000h of work
I have been thought in school that full stop is correct way to do it:smile: Yes i meant 40 thousand dollars.
Probably some 3d project, race game, platformer, something in bigger scope in terms of level design.
That is strange how so many people do the . makes no sense to me I wonder how they write cents?
It’s just a language thing.
Example for fifty thousand and 10 cent € in …
German (and many other languages i guess): 50.000,10 €
English: 50,000.10 €
(as you can see the , and the . are switched)
Back to topic:
My game “Highway Run” (see signature) took about 700 hours of work for 2 people (me and gfx guy).
Now make up your cost per hour and add all your work (communication!) and PR/Marketing time you will need … and of course all the hardware and licences and you will get a nice little number. 
Little disclaimer:
We made the game after our real job and it was our first iOS title, so maybe real full time developers get better results timewise (and maybe qualitywise, too).
Cheers
e
I know ! It just doesn’t make any sense!
I mean, if you look at it, “.” is FULL STOP. So, $40000 with comma makes more sense since “40” and then “comma” is a “continuation” to “1000”, where as if you do “.”, it is full stop (which usually means the end of sentence, or switching to another unit!). I think you europeans need to switch to our more logical system!
Ethan, if you don’t mind me asking, would you like to share your sales number with us? How much did you make in how many month since on App Store? How many copies? And does dropping price affected your sale?
It would be very interesting and helpful to see the total cost and profit / ROI (Return of Investment) for a typical project.
@Bawss: Maybe you are right about the commas and stops. Though i am still wondering why there are no extra units for money in USA like feet, inch or maybe buckets, bags or pockets of money. 
I shared lots of data on my game in it’s thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/133276-Highway-Run-for-iOS
But to answer your question: it’s made just a few thousand bucks in those first 4 months … not enough to live from it at all, but it was a first step in the right direction to learn from. I have to admit that it did better than i expected in first place.
Cheers
e
Dont want any battle here:smile:, but there are so many things that are wrong in naming with US english especially in biology that i could go on for whole year:smile: I mean especially the names that are “simplified” for general audience from offical names to something that is completly missleading and makes no sense.
Just saying every language has problems.
Well this is awkward, the tanks are already on there way 
roflcopter!