(Comment: each game sold about 60$x5m minus 12m to make it.)
During his presentation at the High-Performance Graphics 2009 conference, Tim Sweeney, the CEO and founder of Epic Games, revealed that Gears of War 2 required a $12 million development budget to complete. That is surprisingly low for a high-profile HD game. The project took two years to complete and needed 15 programmers and 12 artists.
Gears of War 2 was released on November 7, 2008 exclusively for the Xbox 360 and sold over 5 million copies worldwide. Needless to say, Gears of War 2 was very profitable for Epic Games.
Interesting is especially the programmers vs artists stats … normally that looks very different.
Guess most of the visual quality comes from procedural / programming end then, not the artists as the number of programmers is quite a bit high for a single platform game and the number of artists quite a bit low for a HD game (though x360 games come out cheaper as it is a single lower resolution hd platform)
How much did it cost to develop the first one? I wonder how many assets were reused and what problems that had to be solved for the first didn’t have to be addressed for the second. I’d love to see a detailed post-mortem comparison.
About that formula in the first post: a huge chunk of the costs involved in a game is marketing(tens of millions for a high profile AAA game like Gears) and that isn’t factored into the $12M development quote. Also have to take publisher cut/manufacturing costs into the equation as well. Epic still made money hand over fist, but not into the multi-hundreds of millions range.
no game invests tens of millions into advertisement. millions at best but in case of exclusive top titles, even that is reduced as the platform owning company will invest serious effort into the marketing too
Keep in mind the crunch culture of Epic, and that part of the employees income comes from the success of the title. Such bonuses to the employees may not be considered the ‘costs’ of development.
I’d be slightly surprised if the final worldwide ad totals for games like Halo 3 and GTA 4 came in under 20 million. These are huge titles with the same kind of media blitzes as blockbuster movies (whose ad budgets spend ~$35 for every $100 spent on actual development in 07).
In this case, though, Gears of War was an established brand with a massive fanbase. They didn’t have very long to wait from the last game and were still running on some of the previous buzz and satisfaction. I’d love to see or even get a hint at how the marketing dollars were spent on Gears 2 vs. Gears 1.
Well, most R’n’d would have been covered in Gears 1. So Gears 2 is basically riding the gravy train.
If you have a core team employed, it gets quite cheap to produce games. An average 3D artist who was pulling in 250k a year for himself, when employed, might only score himself 50-75k a year.
I’m not a programmer, and I’m not sure what a good coder charges contractually vs. employed, but I’m sure there’d be a huge difference.
The moral of this story is building on existing IP is a safe bet, building on existing tech is a safe bet, and employing a small core team is always beneficial.
This is why EA and other companies certainly appear to have a sausage factory appearance, as they release Madden Sequel #18, Need for Speed 14, etc.
contractual programming can range anything from $30 - $150 per hour, but for programmers it must not be forgotten that they don’t tend to have jobs lining up so their are dry peroids between jobs if they work on contract base normally.
Employed you likely fall in the 60k - 100k range per year depending on background, position and tasks.
Yeah I figured it was roughly the same as 3D, but wasn’t sure.
However, your seniors / team leaders will (and should) usually be on bucket more cash than your juniors
Or should they? Is it even desirable to have junior programmers around? With 3D you can offload a lot of the tedious work to them, but for game dev you don’t really want sloppy [coding] work floating around anywhere.
Don’t see a reason why not having juniors.
Seniors don’t fall from sky, they collected their experience as juniors too
Also, Juniors often are able to compensate for the lack of experience with fresh ideas and approaches … and last but not least: someone must do the dirty work
I would take exception to the comparison of salaries between programmers and 3D artists in the game industry. Saying the salaries are roughly the same between the two disciplines is not accurate in the least, from my 12 + years in the business.
After I had racked up numerous titles, and over 5 years experience making games, an engineer was hired in fresh from school at a salary well above what I was making at the time.
There has always been the perception that the engineers are more important to the success of the project than the artists. I have been told numerous times at multiple (previous) employers that the artists are just numbers, that we are roadies to the engineer rock stars, and once even had a terrible art director point at a box of school demo reels, and tell us he had a box of replacements for us.
I try to tell everyone that there should be a team mentality, no one side is better or more valuable than the other, but that never seems to sink in with management. They have the idea that the engineers are the ones who make the games a hit or not.
The one thing Tim Sweeny and his group at Epic subscribe to, is once the core engine is written, the goal of the engineers is to make tools for the designers and artists that make it easy for them to get content in the game, and make the game fun.
Sweeny was the one to state that the balance was going to shift in the next-gen development from a high number of programmers and a lower number of artists on XBOX and PS2 games, to 3 times as many artists than programmers for 360 and PS3 games, and he was right. The amount of time it takes to generate the artwork to the level expected and accepted as next-gen is roughly 3x what it took on previous generations.
And that is just my experience. Your mileage may vary, and if it does, and you are making a comparable salary to the engineers with the same amount of experience as you, just drop me a line, as I am will to take on some freelance work
I’m sure you’re right. I’ve seen art directors paid more than any programmer, but among the rank and file in game companies, I’ve always seen programmers paid more. And you can see that every year in the Game Developer salary survey:
But programmers are paid that much because that’s the market rate. Game programmers are actually paid less than programmers in other fields. I’m not saying it’s fair - in fact I know many programmers are overpaid (I recall during the dot-com boom I interviewed a programmer with entry level skills who wanted $90k/year!)
Management attitudes about artists vs. programmer worth can depend on whether they have an artist or programmer background. I’ve worked for more “creative”-run game companies that programmer-headed ones and I’m sure they saw programmers as an impediment to their creative visions (at least one was pretty blatant about stating it). However, they tend to be nervous about losing a key programmer at a key time, so usually they just think it. Ironically, you may have more overrated/overpaid programmers in those situations since management can’t properly evaluate who’s really important.
It seems to me the biggest general need now is for good technical artists, especially with all the scriptable engines nowadays. I remember working with artists (some of the good, some of them senior) who would just throw stuff over the wall once it looked good on the screen - one would save the same asset out in different directories and assume the right one would be picked up by the engine, and another would scale a model for easy viewing and then export it without considering it would show up in the engine at that scale! I’m working with some technical artists now and I’m impressed they can know content tools inside and out, export everything just right, undertand the game engine, write scripts for game logic, and even delve into game engine source code once in a while!
Well, I myself come from a Technical Director / VFX Supervision background, and I’ve only now started building Unity applications on top of that.
Of course, in true TD fashion, I was [attempting to] make mario clones in Amos on an amiga when I was 8 or 9 years old (frame rate was ass, I didn’t know what an array was, etc etc etc… but it played like mario!)
But as a project manager (which I am not), you do not want to lose your key programmers late on, it can absolutely cripple you
Getting someone else in can set you back a month as they get up to speed, etc.
I was not comparing the salaries of artists vs. programmers, either… I don’t know what programmers get paid, I was wondering
Also, I suspect the reason why game programmers get less money (as someone just pointed out), is because they’re ‘living the dream’… Someone who makes SQL database software is not (each to their own, of course).
