Hi All,
I’m curious about about how much cost (in dollars) make a game like Quantum Break.
Any idea? Or approximation?
Regards.-
20-50 million sounds right to me. Depends on your quality. If you want the same quality or not. If you don’t then why are you asking here? 
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Quantum Break started development in 2011 with a development team of 100. Working off of an average developer cost of $100,000 per year that’s about $10,000,000 per year. Said game was in development for five years which would leads us to a cost of approximately $50,000,000. Naturally this is working off the assumption they didn’t grow the team.
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And they probably outsourced a bunch, so it can go higher depending on how much.
More money than the vast majority of the posters on this forum will ever hope to see in their life unless they somehow get locked in a bank vault in Monaco.
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But I don’t need money beyond what you would consider poverty. You’re under this assumption that somehow it matters that people have more. So far that’s not the case. People think it matters. It doesn’t.
If you have enough to eat and have basic necessities like paying rent and having a couple of items like a bog standard computer, some clothes then you are fine. I know because I am.
I wouldn’t even be slightly more happy if I had more. I have had more on and off over the decades and not once did I even use it. I just gave it away. I know the true value of money is far less than value of people.
On topic that means: you don’t need more than the basic living requirements to make brilliant games.
I totally agree with the non-materialism thing, but in a practical sense I don’t fully agree with your conclusion. It’s far too dependent on the type of project you want to work on.
@Ryiah 's 500 person-year estimate is a clear example of the point, and there’s plenty of stuff your audience might expect that can’t reasonably be done either by a lone person or without a budget - for example, voice acting for a cast of characters.
Well, it is certainly a lot easier to hire voice actors, modelers, etc, if you haven’t given all your extra money away. It is also easier to put time into your own projects if you don’t have to put food on the table with a day job.
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Yeah I’m just responding to our resident communist. I don’t necessarily think having a high budget is important and I think she makes a good point.
If you think having voice acting, modellers etc is required for success you have already failed and there are no exceptions I know of to this rule that aren’t total outliers.
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Spending money will not make you successful. If you suck now, you will suck with money just as much, you’ll just lose more of it along with your health and sanity.
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If you have money and you earned it, then you can grow it if you choose, by hiring more people and making bigger budget things. But if you can’t satisfy condition 1 without money, you will not magically make a better more successful game with more money.
So to me, it’s an irrelevant point. People constantly make great money on shoestring budgets, and choose not to actually go ahead and hire a bunch of people to generate more media and not more gameplay.
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Actually, my point was more apolitical than most of my bullshit! My primary implication was that to create a game of this scope you’re going to need an amount of money that can seem rather unfathomable.
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Since the reason given was curiosity I think basically anything is relevant.
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That said, if you’re willing to live with your target audience complaining for years to come about how cheap you were, you could always just have one voice actor (http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Voice_Actors) for every hundred named NPCs (http://en.uesp.net/wiki/General:smile:emographics). 
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I spent around a year on each prototype for the game I wanted to make. I’ve made few and it’s this final one I’m happy with. If I had to pull a number out of my bottom how much money was invested, it is exactly the amount I can’t afford. It’s both minor and priceless: it’s the expenditure of time.
How much would you sell five years of your life for? What if you wasted or wasn’t able to directly use a lot of those years? Suddenly the shared work of hired hands doesn’t seem ridiculously overpriced at 50 million.
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Every once and a while one of these threads comes along and reminds me how little money there is in games.
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The question is not really how much are you willing to earn, cause we all know working for a big company will earn you more money than being an indie nowadays. Is how much are you willing to sacrifice to remain independent? Or to put it simpler, how much are you willing to give in exchange to work on your own projects?
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This is why I’m kinda pivoting away from the idea of eventually transitioning to a full time indie dev in favour of finding some way to manage it as a hobby where there’s a possibility that somebody will buy my stuff.
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I think that’s a smart move. What’s your primary job atm and do you plan to change that eventually to e.g. have higher hourly income but only work half-time?
I currently work as a technical writer, which is thankfully one of those jobs where you can (relatively, as far as careers where you get paid to write things are concerned) shift over to another job in case anything goes pear shaped, plus I have some design and writing experience elsewhere, usually games related. I could probably switch to an editing job if I wanted to get higher pay for less overall hours though.
My posts look as bad as they do because I don’t bother editing these things, so they thankfully stay far away from my portfolio :v
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Besides the nominal cost, you could also add some billions, as it is necessary something like a Microsoft’s market value to back this up.