What are the most “massive” iPhone games on the market?
I mean, the biggest, more complex and nicer that can be found today?
Among the biggest, there are games like settlers, monkey island special edition, car jack and pack back. Settlers is also considerably complex.
among the more complex on the other side I see games like Zenonia 2 which have a hell a lot of content but as they come from “true mobile devs” (devs with years of JME dev background) are still stunning small
I am playing to “Bio Defense : Zombie Out break” and I was very surprise about the number of mobs coming on your camp O_o…
After 1h30 in the survival mode you have about 150 guys coming on you and on one screen the count could be about 60 or 80. I’ll commit some screens next week.
I really feel amazing about it.
Plants vs Zombies has biggest production value I’ve seen so far. There is an article out there in which they claim development cost (for the iphone alone!) where $1 million!
Which I heavily doubt as the game was out already before and not even the pc version could have cost in that range, its a bigfish - casual portal game and a $1m budget would be a massive risk
Can you find the link to that article about Plants vs Zombies?
Square-Enix have released full featured Final Fantasy-like RPGs on the iPhone.
These devices are just as powerful as gaming computers ~10 years ago, so just think of the size of games we were playing then. There are very few limits.
One million for Plant vs Zombies?
I don’t think so. They dint even spend money advertising PvsZ.
Current iphone-hit games production cost are about 50K$ and 200K$.
For the lazy ones:
The only reason to spend 1 million in such game is:
Developers salary is pretty-pretty high (eg:programmers 150K+). Or lot of people working on the project. But even so, the game was just a port to the iPhone, how it could be? Anyway, i still don’t believe how costly that game was.
Yeah it must be salaries and all that included in all of the time to develop it originally as well as the time to port it to various platforms.
Still thats some bank. I want to work for Popcap now 
even with all that $1M does not sound reasonable. The game is not exactly complex and large parts are straight forward to port or just copy paste + new platform code.
By normal shares the original desktop version would have needed to cost 500k+ which never can be correct, that would have been a totally out of scale budget for the target sector.
1M is then reasonable if they didn’t just include the development but also original license fees for the platform, SDKs and especially the massive marketing required on various platforms
The article didn’t say that they spent a million to produce the iOS version. They just said that they spent a million to make the game itself and that they spend a lot more to market and port to other platforms. It doesn’t surprise me at all that PvsZ would cost a million to develop. That actually sounds on the cheap side. Popcap is well known for taking their time, testing and tweaking for years sometimes before releasing a game.
I think they forgot to mention that the 1M also includes their in-house 2D game engine/tools. Even so, 1M is darn a lot of money for such kind of game…
I worked on various professional studios (my last one Gameloft).
Gameloft have a good reputation for quality XBLA/PSN/WiiWare/iPhone/Mobiles titles, i would not say how much we spend on our titles as I’m still under NDA but i can do a very accurate comparison to our projects and 1M is he*l a lot, too much.
Cheers,
You know… coffee is expensive…
6 guys on an iphone games drinking 5 cups of coffee per day everyday is about :
252 working a year * 5 * 6 = 7560 cups…
or maybe no…maybe they worked the week end too :lol: anyway…
But yeah 1 million USD for this game this unbelievable.
I’ve not worked for big teams but worked for less experienced teams and not even they had to invest enough time to even by “veteran professionals” payment level burn through 1M or even remotely comparable amounts of money.
Also if they wrote an all new engine and tools they didn’t do it juts for this game and it would only partially end on the games budget.
Also “own inhouse engine” falls somehow short of a reasoning for the costs in such a range as that would mean that the project lead deserves to be fired if he could have licensed a low cost engine and base upon that instead of wasting 6 figures on an engine for a game as trivial as this one (I think BM + mapeditor.de.vu and its engine, PushButton and TGB could all easily do the job just as well and they cost $0 to 4 figure for teams of the size for such a game)
This actually sounds like it’ll play more like Diablo than Zelda, but either way, it’s another badass game to look forward to. Now I really need to get a bank account, so I can get a credit card, so I can start an iTunes account.