How much does an average game cost to make? in terms of dollars and hours.
How much does an average non-game cost to make (dollars and hours)
This includes graphics and sound. possibly servers.
If you can provide some insight that would be great.
Depends on the game.
It would be much easier if you could point out some examples, that way it would be much easier to predict some numbers, otherwise all replys are going to be similar to above one:P
No way to really quantify that without quite a bit of detail frankly.
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You have your staff from Programmers to Artists, Marketing, Project Management, Quality Assurance. Sometimes in small projects a person(s) may fill multiple if not all of these roles. One must also consider the cost of a project in worker salary even if they’re working for the purpose of profit sharing, or even for free. Man hours aren’t cheap because even if you work solely on your own for a year on a project and finally released it. You’ve put in a year’s worth of hours, perhaps even more hours than your average worker hour amount and those hours from a industry standpoint are not free.
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You have your software cost unless you’re using free software e.g. Unity Basic, Gimp, Blender, etc. One must also consider the issue of if your staff are well trained in this software or are they experienced in only mainstream industry software such as 3Ds Max, Photoshop. If so, do they have their own license? Or have they only previously worked for a company which provided them with one for their corporate work?
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You also have hardware cost. If you’re releasing to Android / Iphone/Ipad you’re certainly going to want each of those, and sometimes multiple generations of the product so that you can efficiently test your product and make sure that it’s up to a proper level of quality and bug free for those platforms. The same issue is with PCs and Mac systems, perhaps to a even greater degree as you have to test across many different GPUs, and drivers for them.
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Office cost. Are you and your workers in your own rented / owned office? Are you working virtually where you have your own room set aside for a office? What about the costs involved in both a physical communal office as well as virtually? What are the cost/productivity Pros / Cons of working in a office environment versus virtually?
A lot of what I’ve mentioned is going to be based around the scale of your project, what platforms you’re targeting, how many workers you expect to have. It isn’t simply: In the typical app how much does it cost / how many hours does it take? Because it can vary considerably.
Your question is too broad…
What is an ‘average’ app??
What is an ‘average’ game.
I’d suggest using google yourself and seeing what the costs were for making certain games and apps yourself to give you a better understanding.
Right now it’s impossible to answer your question.
Check out the Gamasutra Salary Survey news
$73k yr Game Designer
$92k yr Programmer
$75k yr Art and Animation
$68k yr Audio
$49k yr Quality Assurance
*These are professional yearly rates per employee based on a large US survey.
Even very small games will take a month or two, and AAA games can take large teams years.
Power up a spreedsheet and do some figures or search online for specific games.
Search for angry birds team size and found this article, in it they state that Angry Birds was developed by four people, cost under £70k (about $114k) to make and took 8 months to develop.
Or you can go the true indie route in which case your standard measurement of cost is electricity, water, beans and bread*.
*If things get tough you can drop the beans.
You can make one for free in under 24 hours, but it may not be very good. For mobile, if you’re using Unity, it would be initially $449-499 ($49-99 for dev license and $400 for Unity iPhone). If you can make the entire thing yourself, it can be free. If you decide to hire freelancers to help, there are going to variables like price and time. It also depends on how complex the game/app is. There is really no one set cost to make a game or app .
I recommend searching for postmortem articles on http://gamasutra.com/ I’ve seen project lengths described there anywhere from two months to a year, with two to a half dozen team members. I also like to check the credit screen on any game that has one to get an idea of the team size. If this is your first app, I don’t think you should even consider having a server component.
One pound of flesh, no more, no less.
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