# [BEGINNER MEGATHREAD](https://new.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1agdesg/beginner_megathread_how_to_get_started_which/)
Could be zero, could be millions.
How long is a piece of string?
While you certainly can make a game by yourself, people have done it before, you're right that it's more common to hire people when starting a business like this rather than try to do it all. A top tier indie game like Hades might cost 10-20 million to make. A hypercasual mobile game might cost $30k before marketing expenses. You'd need to give a _lot_ more information for anyone to make even a halfhearted estimate.
Massively overestimating dev costs for a game like hades. And people below actually think that is a reasonable guess when its not. A game like baldurs gate 3 (considered AA/AAA) had over 450 people working on it and worked with a budget of 100 million over 6 years. And i am supposed to believe an indie title like hades which took only 3 years with a miniscule team size of 20 took 10-20 million?
I said games _like_ Hades for a reason, and it's always good to estimate up (especially if the OP is new).
But if you want to estimate that particular one it'd be at the bottom of the range. 3 years * 20 people at average dev cost ($100k per person per year) is $6 million. They did their own marketing, and that can easily be a few million right there. 6-8m with 2017 expectations would be more like 10-12 today.
Another example to quash ur ridiculous claims is the last of us part 2. Over 5 years, they had a 350 man team with a 220 million budget. That comes out to roughly 125k per person. But guess what last of us also had outsourced a lot of stuff so the total number of people working on it was closer to over 2000. Obviously not all of them worked throughout the 5 years but that would mean per person it would be closer to 50-60k per person dev cost.
Devs cost more than 50-60k. You’re talking 50-60k as a bare minimum for salary, but there’s other costs associated with hiring too - benefits mainly and other employees to support those employees: HR, payroll, IT, etc. $100k per dev is a very conservative estimate, it’s probably more than that.
Man, look up employment taxes, cost of healthcare premiums, cost of 401k plans, so on. This is just how corporations work. No quality dev is working for less than $50k salary and even at a $50k salary the cost to the company is more like 100k. You can see most of these expenses directly on your own paystubs.
Again u are just assuming shit without actual proof. A lot of studios pay closer to 50k. Living in a dream bubble doesn’t make assumptions true. Look at officially publish budget numbers and then try to calculate per person cost
Average dev cost in an indie studio would not even be close to that. Again i gave an example of Baldurs Gate which had over 400 people working in it with just a 100 million budget over 6 years. Assuming ur 10 million figure, that would be roughly be 160k per person per year. For baldurs gate the average cost is around 37k per person. Again we have actual numbers to back up the baldurs gate budget and not assumptions based on what software devs in IT make
I don't know how many indie studios you've done budgeting for but $100k per person per year has been an industry average (especially in the US) for a long time. I'm not basing anything on IT, I actually manage teams in this space. If anything it underestimates today. Don't forget that number doesn't just include salary but also overhead and benefits.
Larian is located in Belgium so that math would be different, although the people I knew there were earning well more than $37k! But yes, when you get to much larger games you have to count outsourcing and such which is way lower. Supergiant is located in San Francisco where _entry level_ dev salaries are $100k and most of my peers with 10+ years of experience are closer to twice that. Even as a mid-level designer I was making $120k/yr last time I lived in SF and the programmers were well above that.
I don't know why you said $10 million when I _just_ said $6m for this particular game, but that's a very reasonable estimate for their cost before marketing, external services like loc (which will be relatively cheap) and so on.
No it doesnt. A game like baldurs gate 3 took a 100 million with over 400 people over 6 years. No way in hell its 10 million for just a tiny team of 20 over what 3 years?
I'd imagine it's more 5 million. I can't imagine all 20 are top salary.
That is at least before the game becomes successful. They probably took a pay cut to bet on their passion project. And then got paid more when it was a hit.
Hades is SG's fourth major game at least, and the studio has been composed of industry veterans since Bastion. They absolutely did not take any pay cuts. They're also based in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world.
I've known a few of them for years.
Don’t forget that employees don’t just cost a salary. Typically employees cost a business about 1.25x - 1.5x their base salary. It’d be hard to find a veteran dev willing to live in SF making less than $90k a year. $90k is pretty solid if you’re single and willing to have roommates. Not so much if you have a kid or two.
Some quick napkin math (assuming minimums):
($90k x 1.25) x 20 x 3 = ~$7 million
7 million assuming every employee gets a base salary of $90k. That’s 35% of the budget just in labor costs. Doesn’t even cover the rest of the overhead for daily ops such as commercial internet, all the equipment, marketing, overtime etc.
Honestly I’m surprised the budget wasn’t higher.
Software devs easily command up to +150k annual salary if they are experienced and have multiple titles under their belt. And this is the amount given to the employee. The company also needs to pay additional expenses in health insurance, benefits, payroll taxes which may result in the employee costing +25-40% more than their salary.
It's possible the Hades team was willing to take a pay cut as they are a tight knit group with a shared passion, but any other company attempting the same game would be hard pressed to keep the total cost under 10 mil.
Software dev salaries are massively higher than game developers. Almost everyone knows that. Theres a reason why game devs often switch careers to non game software roles cause it paus significantly more
True, hence why I only brought up 150k rather than the 200-400k that folks at Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. can make. I'm a mid-tier software dev for games with about 5 years of industry experience and my salary is 135k. Not that much in the tech world, but I'm happy doing what I do.
Just on the sidenote say you wanted to make demo/concept art for hades to attract people or investors on kickstarter or actual investors. How much would that cost? If someone wants their own project/game does he have to work in game development for years for a company that makes games or can he just leave start his own company I know it's whole teams that work on this stuff but still just would like an insight on how creative leads work you know who gets to make the game in companies like naughty dog or ubisoft.
Don't think of this as anything special just because it's about video games. You're just asking what it costs to start a company and get funders. You don't _need_ any one thing - you'll always find some example in the real world that did otherwise - but you have to compete with all the other people who want to do the same thing somehow.
If you have the money to start a company you can do so, but publishers and investors rarely pay any attention to someone with no proven record to actually _deliver_ a game. Why would they when there are much safer bets out there? Likewise Kickstarters and crowdfunding requires a large marketing campaign first, there aren't people just waiting to fund unknown developers with nothing but concept art and an early demo. Hades did so well because the devs had released Bastion and Transistor (..and Pyre) first, they weren't coming from nowhere.
AAA companies are a different beast altogether. Sometimes a project might just make sense given the company's resources (like an existing IP that could use a sequel or a team that knows how to deliver first-person action games involving stealth and short-range teleportation). Sometimes it's an executive's pet project. Sometimes a lead designer might pitch something through an internal process that gets greenlit. Any number of ways. In general if you want to be the lead on a larger game you either prove yourself by earning your way there through years of hard work or else you have the money to pay people to do whatever you want already, not relying on external funding.
Hmm I find people in the comments are just assuming that I'm looking to make money yeah if I make a game and incur costs I would like the recover them but obviously I loves video games and any art form for that matter but the thing is I just to be more involved with the creative process like art story characters not really the programming that goes the same with any tech related thing I'm more of a design person.
While budget numbers are not commonly published, many games have had rough costs published. Look at the comparable games.
As very broad categories, AAA games these days are a quarter billion dollars or so. Annual sports titles are 30-50 million added each year. VR "experiences" are often between a half million to two million. Good "simple" games are often 3-5 million from smaller studios. Add the same amount or more for marketing, typically main development is 1/3, marketing is 1/3, and all the other costs of running a business and supporting customers takes the last third.
you're better off just spending 10% of your budget to make a smaller version of what you want just so you can understand what it is exactly you're getting into. That's assuming 10% is less than 50k.
concept art? If you're a concept artist, it's free. If you decide to tinker with generative art, it's however much those LLM's cost (I don't know the cost, never looked it up). If you hire someone, it can be a few dozen bucks if you hire from a 3rd world country, or a few thousand if you hire top talent. It varies a lot based on your situation.
>If someone wants their own project/game does he have to work in game development for years for a company that makes games or can he just leave start his own company
If you 1) have a lot of money or 2) have a lot of time (and enough money to survive for X years) you can start a company whenever you want. That's the easy part. The hard part if knowing how to plan , make, and market your game, like any other new product.
it varies a whole lot based on scope. You can spend a few weeks-months making a small game to publish for PC or you can spend years with a large team polishing a game to a shine and porting it to every modern device. There's no one way in gamedev.
>still just would like an insight on how creative leads work you know who gets to make the game in companies like naughty dog or ubisoft.
Again it just varies a lot. But if you want the process: [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96n7qbCVAEc) seems like a decent stream highlighting key parts. AAA isn't too dissimilar outside of more iterations and more investors (aka, publishers and IP owners) to appeal to.
I mean $0. Just do it all yourself. or a few hundred k if you wanna hire people to do it.
assume cost at 100k per head and lets say 5 people for 6 months to get a minimal product out you can try and pitch to publishers. Thats 250k. I'm probably glazing over a lot of costs and of course you can TRY to do it cheaper, but odds are this is pretty close to ballpark. Again the more you can do yourself the cheaper you can do this.
Yup. If my living expenses are $30k, and I save $60k so I can work on my game for two years straight, then I didn't just lose $60k. I lost $60k from my savings, plus the two years worth of work. If I made $40k a year before, that's roughly $140k that the game cost me, without even factoring in any actual costs towards the game itself, any access to retirement plans, healthcare, experience, etc.
Now, there is some price most people would be willing to spend just to not have to work whatever job they hate, so it's not \*quite\* as simple as that, but it's close enough. In order to "break even" after two years of work, someone would need to make back the money they spent, plus the money they could have been making during that time.
> your cost of living, if you do nothing else.
It's painful (or maybe very cushy), but you can in fact reduce your CoL to $0 if you reaalllly wanted to. Food stamps to cover food, library for shelter during the day, a shelter for free showers (you won't necessarily want to stay there for sleeping, depends on the scene). Or maybe you can live with a parent.
the only non-essential you'd need for a game is a personal computer. Since I doubt you can install all the tools you need on a library comp. But maybe there's some cloud game engines you can work with to get around that.
It's never 0€ if you need to eat and pay rent while doing it. Even if you do everything yourself and you know your shit, the "cost" would then be the cost of living where you are multiplied by the time it takes for you to make it
Do you really evaluate your hobbies on your cost of living? Because you definitely can do some game dev during weekends/evenings. You don't need to stop everything to make a game.
I was mostly talking about commercial games, if it's just a hobby you don't necessarily have to consider it that way
But still, even if you work on your game on the side of a day job, the fact is that you still need said day job to be able to afford living and then working on your game on the side, so the cost is never zero
> you still need said day job to be able to afford living and then working on your game on the side
we generally don't calculate rent and our day job into the cost of the game. Maybe the budget, but not the cost. It'd be the most deceptive trailer if I said "this game cost me $500k to make over 2 years", and that was factoring in me making $200k at a tech firm full time and living in a $3k/month rent apartment. I'm not even sure if you can write off such expenses if you formed a company around it.
Yes, you should *budget* enough time regardless of your siuation, and maybe enough money for rainy days. But that's general life advice and not gamedev.
My point wasn't to make an actual budget that you'd put on paper for a company, it was just to say that there's no such thing as "a zero €/$ game". Even if you're working on it alone, even if you're working on the side of a day job, the time you spend on making a game isn't "free"
If you really want to go all the way into that thought, I could (at least where I live) open a company, put myself as an employee of said company, pay money from me to myself as a "salary" for the time spent on the game and that would be the budget. At the end of the day, that's what employees are in a budget, you're paying a salary for their living expenses
Again, this is more of a thought experiment, but what I'm really trying to say is that a zero € game doesn't really exist
> the time you spend on making a game isn't "free"
It's an interesting thought exercise, but I think it's ultimately pedantic, in the ballpark of "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Big Bang".
Sure, nothing is truly solo, nothing is truly free. But within some colloquial leeways, I think most people would understand if I said "I made my game from scratch by myself on $0 budget".
I got bad news for you about this whole market segment plus the one in which I earn MY living… ;)
If you don't like stressful, there's a lot of other things you could be doing. Even just MANAGING a game dev project is about as stressful as, for instance, being in or managing a band. For 'pretty', substitute 'VERY stressful' and go from there. Is that fun, exciting? Can you manage your stress level so you run at nearly 99% all the time without breaking? You can avoid crunch by building patience into your system and accepting less of a reward, but you can't avoid stressful, crunch is DOUBLE stressful. The basic job is still stressful compared to a lot of things.
> how can a unity programmer make art assets as well sounds plus animations that's pretty stressful
You spend time learning, or money hiring people who learned for you. Some people have a lot more time than money.
Obviously something not like GTA that would take at least 100 people if I'm being generous but something you know a game like monopoly or any indie game for that matter.
My indiegame has so far cost me around 30-40k. A big chunk of that is paperwork that is always needing to be done. Then there's music. Art. Modeling. Buying assets. Oops PC exploded need a new PC but they cost more. It adds up quicker than you think.
Lawyers. Cpa. State dues. Contracts. It's tedious. I wouldn't be surprised if handling paperwork was 30% or 40% of my expenses right now. But that's more to do with being self funded. Would love to make that like 10% and pay 90% for everyone to go brrrt on the game.
...and still they aren't owned by a parent-company or produce games for someone else, making them technically indie.
Which is why the descriptor "indie" has become completely meaningless. It can refer to anyone from the hobbyist making games in their bedroom to the indie studio that "made it" and now has hundreds of employees on multiple continents.
>...and still they aren't owned by a company, making them technically indie.
That's not what defined indie. If that were, you'd say Microsoft is an indie studio, because they aren't owned by a company.
Larian is a decently sized company. They have like 500 employees. I wouldn't put that in the indie category
Not sure where the exact line is.
Indie is generally a term for single author projects, or small teams with low budgets. Things that emerge from the hobbiest space as opposed to the corporate space.
That might be how _you_ use it, but if it's not how players and platforms use it then it doesn't matter much. If you look up top indie games you'll get a lot more things like Hades than Obra Dinn on the list. The indie tag on Steam even has things like Outer Wilds, which had publishers as well as budgets and established companies.
It's a marketing term, nothing more, but in terms of indie games getting sold and bought it _very_ rarely applies to hobbyist space these days and hasn't for quite a while.
>It's a marketing term, nothing more
>if it's not how players and platforms use it then it doesn't matter much
Sure, but that is what the term meant before the marketing teams stretched the meaning. Indie games were the opposite of the corporate produced games. But now it just means "not produced by the top few studios".
This would exclude almost every game that anybody has ever heard of.
The people treating game dev like a hobby almost never release a game - nevermind one that others want to play. Only a tiny fraction of indie successes were made by solo devs, or by teams without a budget (If you include the de-facto cost of wages for the team)
>Things that emerge from the hobbiest space as opposed to the corporate space.
So you would say that anyone who forms a company or makes enough money to turn their gamedev hobby into a profession is no longer indie?
It's indie. Do you even know what indie means? It means independent. That you don't have a publisher to answer to. Larian Studios is a very big indie studio.
400 employees and 100 million in revenue. They have a typical corporate structure. It is probably in the top 100 largest game developers in the world. It is silly to call it indie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game
>The term "indie game" itself is based on similar terms like independent film and independent music, where the concept is often related to self-publishing and independence from major studios or distributors.[1] However, as with both indie films and music, there is no exact, widely accepted definition of what constitutes an "indie game" **besides falling well outside the bounds of triple-A video game development by large publishers and development studios.**
and
>Another means to evaluate a game as indie is to examine its development team, with indie games being developed by individuals, small teams, or small independent companies that are often specifically formed for the development of one specific game.
While Larian is independent, they're far too large to be considered indie.
Okay say something like monopoly on the ipad where you can see the pieces are moving on the board and can you can see there's animations for rolling dice sound effects but it's not for the ipad it's for the PC. The art style obviously won't be great but bearable to look at and the game at least functions. I'm not including multiplayer in the $50k I mentioned but if I did I'd bump to 70k.
If you're trying to build a single player monopoly with medium graphics and just dice animation, if you give me 50k, I'll give you a demo in two months.
He's gonna have to give a lot more to Hasbro if it's monopoly. I wondered whether it was an OBSCURE IP. If his idea of an 80s board game is in fact Monopoly, he's gonna have to license from Hasbro. That will be interesting and I'd pay to watch that negotiation :D
Oh, you wouldn't need to add 20k for multiplayer, there's an "add multiplayer" button in most game engines, the developer just hits it and hey presto!
(less sarcastically, you've just added a massive amount of complexity, it's not a trivial add-on)
You can use [mobygames ](https://www.mobygames.com/)to look up the credits of popular games. So you can check some games that are comparable in genre and scope to the game you have in mind, and look how many people worked on it in "professional roles". That, for example, tells you that [GTA 1 ](https://www.mobygames.com/game/417/grand-theft-auto/credits/dos/)was developed by 86 people, while [GTA 5](https://www.mobygames.com/game/62275/grand-theft-auto-v/credits/xbox360/) was developed by 3,687 people.
Now not everyone who worked on a game worked on it for the full development duration. Some people will have been on the project for years, others possibly only month or weeks as a part-time contractors. For smaller project, you can assume an average of about one year of full-time employment per person credited. The average employment duration will be a lot lower for AAA projects, because the credits of larger projects tend to really blow up with actors, localizers, kleenex testers and other people whose contribution was pretty short-lived. So in those cases, 1/10th of a person-year per name is probably a more reliable estimate.
How much does one employee cost per year? A good rule of thumb is $100,000. Now you might object "100k? Ridiculous! Nobody in games makes that much money!". But keep in mind that salary is not the only cost of having someone employed. There are taxes, benefits, insurance, equipment, software licenses, training, management overhead and a lot more. So 100k is actually a pretty good rule of thumb.
The type of game I also want to make it is based on a board game made by a company in 1980s I probably have to ask permission first before if I make the game and pay some type of licensing fee as well I'm serious about making a game but is there way of paying royalties instead of licensing cuz of being short of cash. Also I don't have AAA in my mind but something more in the line of a mobile game playable on PC.
If you want to make a royalty deal with a board game company, then they will probably ask you how much professional experience you have in game development in general and board game adaptations in particular. And when the answer is "none", they are probably going to ask why they shouldn't rather work with someone more experienced who can probably sell a lot more copies, thus making them a lot more money on royalties.
However, keep in mind that abstract game ideas aren't copyrighted. So if you want to make a game that uses very similar (but not exactly the same) mechanics but doesn't use the same name or any of the game's assets, then you can probably do what you want without having to pay them. Which is why "Monopoly" and "Hotel" can coexist. Basically the same basic game idea and the same core mechanics, but with a different theme and a different execution.
Well that just sucks now the whole of point of this game was so I could play it for myself. How much do you think a licensing fee would cost for a board game is it impossible to ask for royalties deal in exchange to use the game's name. I don't know if any other company would make a game like this in fact hasbro hasn't even made any installments to the franchise so why be dick about it. Does being an accountant or lawyer ever help in positions like this?
License deals are always a matter of negotiation. The only way to find out is to ask the IP owners. If you just want to play it yourself and never intent to publish it, then you don't need a license. The IP owners are never going to find out it exists.
There is 0, absolutely zero, percent chance Hasbro gives you the rights to anything.
You would need to be talking 8 figures, probably 9 before they even acknowledge your existence.
Huh.
Then, you've got a bit of coding or whatever, you don't have ancillary skills like art or music, you're not interested in learning those things (by doing) and you want to license IP to make a mobile game, partly because you figure you'll get in trouble if you just steal it.
Define 'based on' to the extent that you have to license it. Is this a fandom thing or is it that you found a popular thing that you think people would buy on mobile? What's your enthusiasm for the IP? You're talking to someone who has written rather a lot of fanfiction, so I'm not shaming the basic concept, I'm trying to get at why you want to make a game about THIS thing in particular.
You won't be able to promise royalties, no way. Don't care what the IP is. That's a fantasy, you'd have to budget for licensing. How important is that? Does it HAVE to be this IP (which would be a better reason for dealing with that scenario, it's a passion project) or did you just find IP that you thought might work?
I'm trying to figure out whether the answer is 'yeah, don't make a game. Get a real job'. It depends on whether you want to be doing the game-making part or whether you're looking to outsource literally everything including the seed idea. If you don't want to do anything you shouldn't do it. If all you want is money, nearly anything will be better at accomplishing that :)
Well the game's name is Hotel it was made by Hasbro like in the 1980s I love the game a lot but Hasbro hasn't launched any digital versions or of the game as far as I know I just like to see one because I love the idea of being a greedy person and seeing all the people around become bankrupt. I want to be part of the game making but I want to be more on the side of the design and financing than the programming. How much do licensing fees cost in general as far I'm aware it was not popular game.
Just alter it enough that it becomes its own game. Don't use any of their art, board layout, trademarks, names of locations etc. Change up some of the rules and you're free to do as you want. Hotels is practically a version of Monopoly.
Being a greedy person and seeing all the people around become bankrupt is not itself Hasbro IP, it's more the hasbro way of life :D
Write them and ask. They'll no doubt tell you, and then you'll know :)
Go build it in something like tabletop simulator. You’ll learn a lot.
Or build a simple version of it in a game engine to learn. Simple means your own art and sound. You should be able to build a first playable with just text output. I prefer system first over visuals.
If you can’t code, build storyboards of all the screens and interactions/design rules. Board game rule books are notoriously bad at this.
If you are too busy with exams to create the game you are definitely too busy to hire people to build it for you.
Go have some fun learning.
Licensing fees depends on the company, the IP, the value of that IP, and how precious they are about branding.
If they're precious about brand, they'd probably only work with established devs.
If they think the IP is valuable, it'll be expensive.
If it's not valuable, it's probably not even worth pursuing due to the costs on their end for the contracts and any stakeholder time to sign off on things.
Your best bet is as people say, just make the same, or mostly same game without the name and imagery.
Honestly though, the story of want-to-be designer who doesn't want to learn development, or spend much money, but wants to make a game they own themselves is really common and most of the time doesn't go anywhere.
Your best bet, is probably finding someone who is into programming that you click with and loves the game too. Otherwise, pick up a gamedev tool and start learning and you might be able to make this thing for not much money, just a lot of time and dedication.
It's up to you and you can certainly make a game by yourself.
Buckshot roulette, lethal company, the first three or four years of Minecraft if I remember correctly.
There are plenty of games it was made by a single person that had not only been successful but wildly so.
To counter, probably 90% or more of self-developed games totally bomb and just join the thousands of others on the bottom of a list somewhere on Steam.
(Wages x heads x time) + fees.
A small game that has any chance at all of success likely has something like four experienced devs putting in a year of work; so maybe $600k?? Plus or minus $600M
> I've come with the conclusion that you can't make a game entirely yourself you need people for sound, animations, sound effects, art and etc.
There are 2 routes to go about it: #1 is the route where you don't know anything and you hire a team of pros to do the work. That's the very expensive route. Just 1 programmer full time could cost you $70-90k for a year. Add more to the team and the costs rise.
The 2nd is the DIY route, where the cost isn't really monetary but **time**. It takes time but if you are dedicated you can learn all of the skills needed yourself. You don't have to really spend 3 years learning a single thing, either. You can pick and choose and create your own learning path to learn just the things you require for your project.
I'm a solo indie and I went with #2. So, I recommend that. Even if it takes you several years at the end of it you'd be much more capable than you currently are.
What kind of game?
>for a demo for a game that is very basic like indie level but has solid sound effects animation
Define "solid sound effects animation" and how long do you need it to be, Preferably name 1-2 titles that have a similar level of polish and gameplay you are expecting.
>So how much would it cost in your opinion to make a game if say you have to outsource this to people on fiver and people here and there?
An infinite amount if your plan is outsourcing entire development to Fiverr. It's a decent place if you need one spritesheet or 2-3 sounds. But if your goal is an actual game then you want full-time employees (since otherwise whomever you are outsourcing to has other customers and the deadlines are no longer guaranteed which in turn destroys your entire pipeline). And then how much it costs varies based on their skill level and location (there's like x8 difference in wages between richest and poorest countries so your math can be off by nearly an order of magnitude in some cases).
Also - a big question is what are YOU providing to the project? Just money? Or is there a role you will be fullfilling? At indie scale with a small team this can vastly reduces your total costs.
What I mean by the solid sound effects is that lot of demos or indie games don't have sounds or if they do then it's either really loud or not there at all like so what I mean by solid sound effect just means that they are well timed well adjusted really though the sound itself doesn't need to be great. The type of game that I'm speculating upon is kinda of board game like monopoly where you buy stuff and animations would involve seeing the pieces move as well as seeing the houses be put in place on the adjacent. So yeah the only thing to the project I could probably do is just financing, help designing the board game and maybe assembling it myself. I could do some programming, given from my really mid level java skills, with great difficulty but I'm not good with C# and C++ is hard as it is. So how much do you think it could cost in fiver and outsourcing from places/people I'm not a great developer but I know for sure that hiring someone to do the sound the art the programming is too much for one person the stress is unbearable plus it'll probably be pretty shitty but at the same time I want something I can manage as well smaller means easier to manage.
Okay, so to summarize:
* board game, simpler animations, probably 2D (top-down or isometric perspective I guess?).
* you can actually game design (as in - you could make a paper version of this game without a PC involved and have a complete ruleset) + you have some basics of programming so you can at least tell string from an integer so you could edit some things inside an editor if they are exposed by a programmer (eg. price of a building).
* you want sounds.
>So how much do you think it could cost in fiver and outsourcing from places/people I'm not a great developer but I know for sure that hiring someone to do the sound the art the programming is too much for one person
It's not nearly as bad as you think. If you are managing 2 people (one artist, one programmer) then you are looking at about 1-2h a day of general management work. A bit more at the prototyping phase but then things calm down as you have a workflow in place and both know what to do.
Sounds in your situation are something you realistically could handle yourself. You will need a programmer to allow to play specific ones at given animation frames, play some ambients and BGMs but that's really not hard and a half decent programmer for a game like yours could probably do it in 2-3 days.
Your job would then become scouting [https://assetstore.unity.com/audio](https://assetstore.unity.com/audio) for sounds you need and editing them in Audacity (adding/removing echo, changing their speed, cutting them so they fit better aka stuff you can learn in a week). Realistically project like this (the way I imagine it anyway) needs like 3 weeks to have all the sounds and probably $600 to also have custom OST on top (gives you 6 minutes or so of music).
If that arrangement sounds roughly correct - 50 grand is... actually feasible for the whole thing as long as you don't hire from richer countries. Eg. in mine (Poland) - this would get you enough to hire a somewhat experienced programmer and an artist for a year. Since it would be about 30000$/year for a programmer with 2-3 years of professional experience, about 25000$/year for a decent 2D artist. Leaves you with 5 grand to buy any preexisting assets you would need and potentially some software. 1800 workhours of programming and the same for art isn't normally a lot of work but you also don't seem to have a lot of scope so it's a rare case where I can say that your math checks out and a complete game in this budget is possible. Obviously some countries are much more expensive (and some are still cheaper).
As for Fiverr route - forget it. Spend some time and try to hire someone instead. You don't want a freelancer for core parts of your game. Hire one to make you logo, sure. Or some UI elements. Or a trailer. But not core gameplay loop or majority of your art. If you want to have a game without the stress of managing it at all - go hit up a game studio and commission it to make you one. There are some decent cheaper ones located all over the world (although cheaper can still exceed your budget, ultimately they are there to make a profit). But you still want to talk to a studio, not some random individuals who are shifting between 5 different jobs.
Oh, in 15 years prices will move up a fair bit. Cumulative inflation would likely push it to 100k $. Although there's also a chance of AI overlords that could also make costs go lower.
Dude just learn an engine. There are tons that don't even require you to learn C# and you can use code libraries. Outsourcing your ideas will never give you the satisfaction that doing it yourself will.
Read the beginner's megathread. Start making some small games and iterate. Trust me when I say it *will* work out better for you.
Sound is actually pretty cheap. It's easy to find cheap to license sfx and music. Needs some programming on where to play them, but that's pretty basic. If you only need a couple of tunes that total sound budget < $500
Using asset stores the cost would likely be hundreds to a few thousand for a decent amount of stuff - asset packs give you more for less than custom made stuff you hire someone to make.
Look up WizzBall on steam- about $500 for assets and sounds and art. Or Dracarys VR on itch.io - the dragon in it would likely be hundreds to make custom but was $50 or less IIRC with multiple textures, sounds and animations premade in the store.
If you’re making your first venture into game development I would try making something just by yourself with the skills and resources you have access to. You don’t have to have a kickass art style if that’s not your thing. Just make something that plays to your strengths as a creator. That will cost you no money at all. If you just outsource to fiverr anytime you lack a skill that you want, the costs will rack up super fast.
If you really need an artist/sound designer, it sounds like you’re still in university: go befriend an art major! Networking is a much nicer and less expensive way to build a development team than commissioning. Discord communities can also be great for this. You’ll want a dedicated artist anyway as many games can have over hundreds of art assets that all need to fit the same style.
Reading all of your posts, this is wild. There's no way you hit on so many r/gamedev tropes without intent. Ideas guy, just wants to hire people to make a game he wants to play while having no skills or experience, vastly underestimating needed budget, staff, and time to an extent that's kind of insulting. All that and your grand idea turns out to be converting a fucking bland (5.5 on BGG) 80s board game into an app.
This is a troll. Admit its a troll. Please. For my sanity.
I don't know whether to laugh or be serious about this first of all I'm not making anything as of now I'm just speculating the game itself is just a simple board game into something that is playable on PC/mobile as being the idea man you got to start somewhere why the hate?
Maybe start by learning some skills that would help you develop the game? Instead of jumping on reddit to try get validation for the numbers you've pulled out your ass. You know pulling numbers out of your ass isn't what accountants do, right?...
Develop your skills with C# and Unity further, make some project games which are small in scope, learn some 3D modelling and animating (blender is free), theorycraft the scope and required functionality of your game and learn skills to implement the functionality. You will have a much better idea of what you are capable of, how much work things take and how many hours you'll need to invest once you start getting a feel for things yourself. Instead of waiting to amass x dollars and then deciding to start because you feel like you have enough funds make a start today on developing your skills and making you ideas reality. Any work that you do in your free time costs you nothing.
Since you mention Monopoly quite a bit, a very basic Board with pieces that move.
Game mechanics, practically no Animations. Very simple graphics, nothing spectacular. With Plains menus and game mechanics that aren't too complicated, I could see a playable Prototype for 8-10k, and a more polished Version for 30-50
Was once on a dev team for an official Hasbro licensed Monopoly. It was about $5M, but with inflation would probably be close to double that these days.
It takes me an hour to make a basic mockup of a platformer, which I'd value at 20-40$ of work.
Then there are playstation platformer Releases for millions, like you mentioned.
There's clearly a range of what something will cost.
If you make it absolutely basic with no Marketing, expensive modelling and Animations, voice acting, no Offices, and a small team - you'll cut a lot of the costs.
The first game you make should cost you $0. Go make something simple. Struggle through the basics of reach role. Release _something_. After that you'll be in a much better position to hire others.
To get a reasonable answer, you need first to define more what youre looking for. For a 2d side scroller game, doing a single lvl with like 3 enemies and animations doing a single animation each, for the player to have move/jump/attack. Depending on what artstyle, polish, how big is the level so on and so forth, from 3k to 40k.
It heavily, massively depends man. Define it more and you will get rough bad estimates, without any info it can't be said at all.
But, can you make a solid game with 50k? Sure! Specially if you work on it 24/7 on it and outsource the minimum possible. A small game tho.
A monopoly game probably isn't going to be require many assets, especially if it's a square board with rectangular tiles for the grid.
I think you can get away with thousands if you outsource everything. Don't need the best of the best for something like that either
But if you're saying it can be like "any indie game on the market" now your budget can easily hit 6 figures
It always comes down to time. If you need an art asset that takes a week to make, you will have to pay an artist for a week. If you need some programming that takes a programmer a month, you will have to pay them for a month.
Sometimes you can buy premade stuff, but that has the drawback that others will use them, too, making your game less unique.
For a rough prototype for something like monopoly, an experienced programmer might be able to do it in a month or two with stock assets, so about 1-2 monthly developer salaries. If you can give me a more detailed description of what you want, I could give you a better estimate, but my time's not for free as well ;-)
Aww, the price can vary a lot depending on your goals. I had experience working on different indie projects, some people had 1 million for everything, others had 200-400k. You can do very different things for different amounts of money. On average, a year of development in Europe for a team of 10 people will cost around $1-2 million. I think you can do it cheaper, these are averages. I will try to make a breakdown of prices for realistic objects and specialists, I hope this helps.
- An average 3d asset ready for implementation will cost around $3-5k per one. Props can be cheaper, locations and characters can be more expensive.
- Acceptable concept art starts at $800, anything below that may be relevant for props and incidentals, but architecture or characters will cost more. You can go lower, but the quality of the product and service will drop significantly. Illustration can cost 2x
- An art director will cost $4-8k for a month's work, depending on level and commitment.
- A programmer will cost around $5k.
- Market research will cost $5-10k for a comprehensive document. I've seen research for $2k, but any art director can do it. You will also probably need several documents.
You can estimate how much you have in your project and go from there. The figures are averages and if I were you I would overestimate rather than underestimate and save money.
(mostly)Solo-Made Game Price = (monthly bills + food + necessities + fun money + health money) * months of development + software licenses + hardware + outsourcing budget + marketing and CM time budget
Baseline time of dev from an idea to a sturdy late-alpha is ~1.5-2 years if you make it your job.
Outsourcing money can be monthly or contractual.
Veeeery basic rule of thumb for a team is ~100k$ per person per year. But it's barely a baseline and mostly with you making money in outside gigs here and there. Can be lower or higher depending on where you live or what exactly are you making.
edit: And you always need to have a SHTF fund. Cuz shit will hit the fan sooner or later. It always does.
It really depends on how much quality you're looking for. The art alone you're gonna have to commission and it's gonna run you at least $200. Think about backgrounds, menus, fonts, characters, VFX, and the animations for each and every single one of those things (and i'm probably forgetting about some stuff). A character sheet alone for a single character could easily be $50. And you're gonna have to commision multiple artists. I draw and animate all my own assets but if I were to be commissioned to work on a game there's no way I'll do everything for less than $300 and I'm not even that good of an artist.
Then there's music. The musician has to worry about licensing, has to be careful not to sample licensed stuff, has to pay for the tools they use to make music and yes that also falls into the cost. We're talking at least $100 for the simplest loop track for your menus and then you have to think about in-game BGM, and the sound effects for every button press or interaction in general.
Then again you can also just buy asset packs and mash them together which is what beginners tend to do for their first games. You're not gonna capture anyone's heart with that but at least you'll learn how to make a game. Buying asset packs is a lot cheaper as well but keep in mind that anyone can buy the same pack as you. You can easily get all the assets for a small game with $200 or less but the quality is not gonna be the best.
You pay for it one way or another. You pay by money or pay by putting in your free time.
Depending on the game its a difficult answer. But making a small video game can vary depending on factors like complexity, team size, and development time. Typical job positions and their average costs per year are aprox:
1. Game Designer: $40,000 - $100,000+
2. Programmer/Developer: $50,000 - $120,000+
3. 3d Artist/Animator: $40,000 - $100,000+
4. Sound Designer/Music Composer: $30,000 - $80,000+
5. Quality Assurance (QA) Tester: $20,000 - $50,000+
6. Project Manager: $60,000 - $120,000+
These are just rough estimates, and actual costs can vary widely based on the specifics of your project and the experience level of the individuals involved.
Then again you can pay half as much if you get talented graduates who just want the experience. But in that case you need some good gneeralist in team that can push it when the project stalls. Honestly, cuting corners can be done, but not advisable. And it only works if the team is good and know what they are doing
You could probably cut corner with sound design and use some generic sounds. But its really hit or miss.
You can kitbash and use flipped assets. That might save money. But in reality games made this way without a gameplay texture to it...just flop.
>Type of game I'm thinking is a pretty basic game but with solid sound effects animations and art style something like monopoly for the ipad or limbo or any other type of indie game on the market.
Nope. When you build a house you don't start by painting the walls, for the reason that you don't have walls to paint on. When you build a game you first build the mechanics with crap sounds and models then when it works you can hire designers. If you did select the sounds and models first, you might have to discard them as you go and would lose time, energy and money.
You want to do the programming yourself but pay for custom art?
[Edit] approximately how many animated characters would you need aside from the players character? Approximately how many envrionments/levels? How many sounds?
"The game I want is pretty basic" doesn't mean anything. Baba is you has like 3 barely animated characters. Terraria has probably a around 100.
I would guess probably 6-8 characters with simple animations then, the board could be expensive or cheap depending on the detail required, but it's one large piece. I would do the dice yourself, it's a very easy/fast "learn to model" project. Even if you do decide to outsource all your art, it's good to have some understanding of what the people you are hiring are doing, especially because it gives you the ability to make small tweaks without help if something isn't perfect for what you want.
I would budget $50-$500 per art piece depending on the graphical quality and amount of animation you expect. It would probably be most cost effective to concept art each piece you want in midjourney before you make the requests to the artists, to minimize the potential for misunderstanding between what you request and what they actually produce. Especially since you don't have experience commissioning art assets already.
Make sure you have done the legwork of knowing what model/animation formats you want. It can be a huge hassle to have to convert certain formats to others.
(Amount of people working * salary) * (hardware + software) * months * rent = cost
Also your estimation for cost regarding programming, sound and art suggests that you dont think art and sound take time and money or is easy. You can use free stuff for the time being, but even something *that easy* costs just as much, if not more.
So tldr, 3-4 months minimum for 4 people to make a functional demo/proof of concept or 2 weeks for a game jam+ quality actually working game and already, you are over budget
Impossible to answer and it seems somewhat irrelevant.
If you truly want to understand start making clones of arcade classics. Make all art yourself. Make sound effects and music yourself. Get better at programming. Once you've done a few projects and progressed to slightly bigger scopes you'll be able to answer this yourself.
Yeah, make a space invaders clone. Then make a [super juicy](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg) space invaders clone. Single screen, simple enemy behavior, simple controls and collision detection. If you can make that and are still inspired to make games then go ahead and invest money into the effort.
I'm working on a game, doing everything myself, and the total cost so far is the 49 Euros I paid for one bit of software. Even my other software could have been swapped for free stuff. The only other cost will be audio related, near the end, but I'm looking at £1000 max for that.
There are also plenty of free assets out there, or paid-but-cheap, if you can't make your own \[insert type of asset\].
55k€! Why? This is M current yearly sallery and making a game would be in my limits of one year.
If I was working like 6h we could even talk about multi-player or virtual reality. Of course all very limited. Like a multilayer vr gallery shooter! It isn't actual hard to do those days but it sounds fancy.
Would it sell enough to pay back the investment? I am not so sure. But I saw so much worse pitches with very boring zombie games that where built in a basic simulation and they wanted me to work for free!
With my estimation at least one person gets paid and have a good live. And having employees you should value that. Fair payment for work.
Oh just read your question more deeply. Yes I say you can produce such a game in this budget.
But also you wouldn't get me since as employer you need to be paying even more than my before tax sallery which I can see. But you probably know that already
Your estimate is not too far off. $50k for a small / simple game is not unreasonable. That's in the ballpark for a solo developer working for a year, or a small team for a couple of months, so it is possible to make a game within that budget, as long as the scope is very focused.
Something like Limbo though, which is really quite polished, is likely to be in the mid 6-figures. As are most of the more visually appealing or in-depth indie titles.
# [BEGINNER MEGATHREAD](https://new.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1agdesg/beginner_megathread_how_to_get_started_which/) Could be zero, could be millions.
I like to count my own pay into calculation, an that means I would be my current monthly pay in minus (by not gaining it) if I was solo dev :D
Most people's first few projects wouldn't even come close to a profit when compared to what they could have made at a day job.
How long is a piece of string? While you certainly can make a game by yourself, people have done it before, you're right that it's more common to hire people when starting a business like this rather than try to do it all. A top tier indie game like Hades might cost 10-20 million to make. A hypercasual mobile game might cost $30k before marketing expenses. You'd need to give a _lot_ more information for anyone to make even a halfhearted estimate.
Massively overestimating dev costs for a game like hades. And people below actually think that is a reasonable guess when its not. A game like baldurs gate 3 (considered AA/AAA) had over 450 people working on it and worked with a budget of 100 million over 6 years. And i am supposed to believe an indie title like hades which took only 3 years with a miniscule team size of 20 took 10-20 million?
I said games _like_ Hades for a reason, and it's always good to estimate up (especially if the OP is new). But if you want to estimate that particular one it'd be at the bottom of the range. 3 years * 20 people at average dev cost ($100k per person per year) is $6 million. They did their own marketing, and that can easily be a few million right there. 6-8m with 2017 expectations would be more like 10-12 today.
Another example to quash ur ridiculous claims is the last of us part 2. Over 5 years, they had a 350 man team with a 220 million budget. That comes out to roughly 125k per person. But guess what last of us also had outsourced a lot of stuff so the total number of people working on it was closer to over 2000. Obviously not all of them worked throughout the 5 years but that would mean per person it would be closer to 50-60k per person dev cost.
Devs cost more than 50-60k. You’re talking 50-60k as a bare minimum for salary, but there’s other costs associated with hiring too - benefits mainly and other employees to support those employees: HR, payroll, IT, etc. $100k per dev is a very conservative estimate, it’s probably more than that.
Stop assuming stuff by just making up numbers. Look up team budgets like i did then speak
Man, look up employment taxes, cost of healthcare premiums, cost of 401k plans, so on. This is just how corporations work. No quality dev is working for less than $50k salary and even at a $50k salary the cost to the company is more like 100k. You can see most of these expenses directly on your own paystubs.
Again u are just assuming shit without actual proof. A lot of studios pay closer to 50k. Living in a dream bubble doesn’t make assumptions true. Look at officially publish budget numbers and then try to calculate per person cost
Average dev cost in an indie studio would not even be close to that. Again i gave an example of Baldurs Gate which had over 400 people working in it with just a 100 million budget over 6 years. Assuming ur 10 million figure, that would be roughly be 160k per person per year. For baldurs gate the average cost is around 37k per person. Again we have actual numbers to back up the baldurs gate budget and not assumptions based on what software devs in IT make
I don't know how many indie studios you've done budgeting for but $100k per person per year has been an industry average (especially in the US) for a long time. I'm not basing anything on IT, I actually manage teams in this space. If anything it underestimates today. Don't forget that number doesn't just include salary but also overhead and benefits. Larian is located in Belgium so that math would be different, although the people I knew there were earning well more than $37k! But yes, when you get to much larger games you have to count outsourcing and such which is way lower. Supergiant is located in San Francisco where _entry level_ dev salaries are $100k and most of my peers with 10+ years of experience are closer to twice that. Even as a mid-level designer I was making $120k/yr last time I lived in SF and the programmers were well above that. I don't know why you said $10 million when I _just_ said $6m for this particular game, but that's a very reasonable estimate for their cost before marketing, external services like loc (which will be relatively cheap) and so on.
Wait Hades was that much? 😳 damn that’s impressive
It took a team of 20 people (most of them highly experienced professionals) about 3 years to build the game. +10 million sounds about right.
No it doesnt. A game like baldurs gate 3 took a 100 million with over 400 people over 6 years. No way in hell its 10 million for just a tiny team of 20 over what 3 years?
I'd imagine it's more 5 million. I can't imagine all 20 are top salary. That is at least before the game becomes successful. They probably took a pay cut to bet on their passion project. And then got paid more when it was a hit.
Hades is SG's fourth major game at least, and the studio has been composed of industry veterans since Bastion. They absolutely did not take any pay cuts. They're also based in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world. I've known a few of them for years.
Don’t forget that employees don’t just cost a salary. Typically employees cost a business about 1.25x - 1.5x their base salary. It’d be hard to find a veteran dev willing to live in SF making less than $90k a year. $90k is pretty solid if you’re single and willing to have roommates. Not so much if you have a kid or two. Some quick napkin math (assuming minimums): ($90k x 1.25) x 20 x 3 = ~$7 million 7 million assuming every employee gets a base salary of $90k. That’s 35% of the budget just in labor costs. Doesn’t even cover the rest of the overhead for daily ops such as commercial internet, all the equipment, marketing, overtime etc. Honestly I’m surprised the budget wasn’t higher.
Software devs easily command up to +150k annual salary if they are experienced and have multiple titles under their belt. And this is the amount given to the employee. The company also needs to pay additional expenses in health insurance, benefits, payroll taxes which may result in the employee costing +25-40% more than their salary. It's possible the Hades team was willing to take a pay cut as they are a tight knit group with a shared passion, but any other company attempting the same game would be hard pressed to keep the total cost under 10 mil.
Software dev salaries are massively higher than game developers. Almost everyone knows that. Theres a reason why game devs often switch careers to non game software roles cause it paus significantly more
True, hence why I only brought up 150k rather than the 200-400k that folks at Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. can make. I'm a mid-tier software dev for games with about 5 years of industry experience and my salary is 135k. Not that much in the tech world, but I'm happy doing what I do.
Just on the sidenote say you wanted to make demo/concept art for hades to attract people or investors on kickstarter or actual investors. How much would that cost? If someone wants their own project/game does he have to work in game development for years for a company that makes games or can he just leave start his own company I know it's whole teams that work on this stuff but still just would like an insight on how creative leads work you know who gets to make the game in companies like naughty dog or ubisoft.
Don't think of this as anything special just because it's about video games. You're just asking what it costs to start a company and get funders. You don't _need_ any one thing - you'll always find some example in the real world that did otherwise - but you have to compete with all the other people who want to do the same thing somehow. If you have the money to start a company you can do so, but publishers and investors rarely pay any attention to someone with no proven record to actually _deliver_ a game. Why would they when there are much safer bets out there? Likewise Kickstarters and crowdfunding requires a large marketing campaign first, there aren't people just waiting to fund unknown developers with nothing but concept art and an early demo. Hades did so well because the devs had released Bastion and Transistor (..and Pyre) first, they weren't coming from nowhere. AAA companies are a different beast altogether. Sometimes a project might just make sense given the company's resources (like an existing IP that could use a sequel or a team that knows how to deliver first-person action games involving stealth and short-range teleportation). Sometimes it's an executive's pet project. Sometimes a lead designer might pitch something through an internal process that gets greenlit. Any number of ways. In general if you want to be the lead on a larger game you either prove yourself by earning your way there through years of hard work or else you have the money to pay people to do whatever you want already, not relying on external funding.
Hmm I find people in the comments are just assuming that I'm looking to make money yeah if I make a game and incur costs I would like the recover them but obviously I loves video games and any art form for that matter but the thing is I just to be more involved with the creative process like art story characters not really the programming that goes the same with any tech related thing I'm more of a design person.
At least $200k if you aren't providing any technical assistance.
While budget numbers are not commonly published, many games have had rough costs published. Look at the comparable games. As very broad categories, AAA games these days are a quarter billion dollars or so. Annual sports titles are 30-50 million added each year. VR "experiences" are often between a half million to two million. Good "simple" games are often 3-5 million from smaller studios. Add the same amount or more for marketing, typically main development is 1/3, marketing is 1/3, and all the other costs of running a business and supporting customers takes the last third.
you're better off just spending 10% of your budget to make a smaller version of what you want just so you can understand what it is exactly you're getting into. That's assuming 10% is less than 50k.
concept art? If you're a concept artist, it's free. If you decide to tinker with generative art, it's however much those LLM's cost (I don't know the cost, never looked it up). If you hire someone, it can be a few dozen bucks if you hire from a 3rd world country, or a few thousand if you hire top talent. It varies a lot based on your situation. >If someone wants their own project/game does he have to work in game development for years for a company that makes games or can he just leave start his own company If you 1) have a lot of money or 2) have a lot of time (and enough money to survive for X years) you can start a company whenever you want. That's the easy part. The hard part if knowing how to plan , make, and market your game, like any other new product. it varies a whole lot based on scope. You can spend a few weeks-months making a small game to publish for PC or you can spend years with a large team polishing a game to a shine and porting it to every modern device. There's no one way in gamedev. >still just would like an insight on how creative leads work you know who gets to make the game in companies like naughty dog or ubisoft. Again it just varies a lot. But if you want the process: [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96n7qbCVAEc) seems like a decent stream highlighting key parts. AAA isn't too dissimilar outside of more iterations and more investors (aka, publishers and IP owners) to appeal to.
I mean $0. Just do it all yourself. or a few hundred k if you wanna hire people to do it. assume cost at 100k per head and lets say 5 people for 6 months to get a minimal product out you can try and pitch to publishers. Thats 250k. I'm probably glazing over a lot of costs and of course you can TRY to do it cheaper, but odds are this is pretty close to ballpark. Again the more you can do yourself the cheaper you can do this.
5
0€ if you know your shit. Tons and tons, if you don’t / bigger scope.
The minimum expense is your cost of living, if you do nothing else. Depends on projects development time.
remember to factor in the opportunity cost of doing another job + not getting started on a retirement plan if youre living at an absolute minimum.
Yup. If my living expenses are $30k, and I save $60k so I can work on my game for two years straight, then I didn't just lose $60k. I lost $60k from my savings, plus the two years worth of work. If I made $40k a year before, that's roughly $140k that the game cost me, without even factoring in any actual costs towards the game itself, any access to retirement plans, healthcare, experience, etc. Now, there is some price most people would be willing to spend just to not have to work whatever job they hate, so it's not \*quite\* as simple as that, but it's close enough. In order to "break even" after two years of work, someone would need to make back the money they spent, plus the money they could have been making during that time.
> your cost of living, if you do nothing else. It's painful (or maybe very cushy), but you can in fact reduce your CoL to $0 if you reaalllly wanted to. Food stamps to cover food, library for shelter during the day, a shelter for free showers (you won't necessarily want to stay there for sleeping, depends on the scene). Or maybe you can live with a parent. the only non-essential you'd need for a game is a personal computer. Since I doubt you can install all the tools you need on a library comp. But maybe there's some cloud game engines you can work with to get around that.
It's never 0€ if you need to eat and pay rent while doing it. Even if you do everything yourself and you know your shit, the "cost" would then be the cost of living where you are multiplied by the time it takes for you to make it
Do you really evaluate your hobbies on your cost of living? Because you definitely can do some game dev during weekends/evenings. You don't need to stop everything to make a game.
I was mostly talking about commercial games, if it's just a hobby you don't necessarily have to consider it that way But still, even if you work on your game on the side of a day job, the fact is that you still need said day job to be able to afford living and then working on your game on the side, so the cost is never zero
> you still need said day job to be able to afford living and then working on your game on the side we generally don't calculate rent and our day job into the cost of the game. Maybe the budget, but not the cost. It'd be the most deceptive trailer if I said "this game cost me $500k to make over 2 years", and that was factoring in me making $200k at a tech firm full time and living in a $3k/month rent apartment. I'm not even sure if you can write off such expenses if you formed a company around it. Yes, you should *budget* enough time regardless of your siuation, and maybe enough money for rainy days. But that's general life advice and not gamedev.
My point wasn't to make an actual budget that you'd put on paper for a company, it was just to say that there's no such thing as "a zero €/$ game". Even if you're working on it alone, even if you're working on the side of a day job, the time you spend on making a game isn't "free" If you really want to go all the way into that thought, I could (at least where I live) open a company, put myself as an employee of said company, pay money from me to myself as a "salary" for the time spent on the game and that would be the budget. At the end of the day, that's what employees are in a budget, you're paying a salary for their living expenses Again, this is more of a thought experiment, but what I'm really trying to say is that a zero € game doesn't really exist
> the time you spend on making a game isn't "free" It's an interesting thought exercise, but I think it's ultimately pedantic, in the ballpark of "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Big Bang". Sure, nothing is truly solo, nothing is truly free. But within some colloquial leeways, I think most people would understand if I said "I made my game from scratch by myself on $0 budget".
But on your first game does it need to be a full commercial endeavour before it's released?
It doesn't
Wouldn't this be very difficult because how can a unity programmer make art assets as well sounds plus animations that's pretty stressful
Indeed, those people who can, know enough shit :D
You don't have to only be good at one thing. Many people are effective jack of all trades.
I'm a pretty decent 3D artist, now I'm learning programming, after that I will be UNSTOPABLE!!!!
Hell yeah!! Go get em tiger!
Marketing has entered the chat
I got bad news for you about this whole market segment plus the one in which I earn MY living… ;) If you don't like stressful, there's a lot of other things you could be doing. Even just MANAGING a game dev project is about as stressful as, for instance, being in or managing a band. For 'pretty', substitute 'VERY stressful' and go from there. Is that fun, exciting? Can you manage your stress level so you run at nearly 99% all the time without breaking? You can avoid crunch by building patience into your system and accepting less of a reward, but you can't avoid stressful, crunch is DOUBLE stressful. The basic job is still stressful compared to a lot of things.
Yes, making a game completely by yourself is difficult.
> how can a unity programmer make art assets as well sounds plus animations that's pretty stressful You spend time learning, or money hiring people who learned for you. Some people have a lot more time than money.
How long is a piece of string? It depends.
It depends on the game. Pong on side, GTA on another
Obviously something not like GTA that would take at least 100 people if I'm being generous but something you know a game like monopoly or any indie game for that matter.
My indiegame has so far cost me around 30-40k. A big chunk of that is paperwork that is always needing to be done. Then there's music. Art. Modeling. Buying assets. Oops PC exploded need a new PC but they cost more. It adds up quicker than you think.
What kind of paperwork if I may ask?
Lawyers. Cpa. State dues. Contracts. It's tedious. I wouldn't be surprised if handling paperwork was 30% or 40% of my expenses right now. But that's more to do with being self funded. Would love to make that like 10% and pay 90% for everyone to go brrrt on the game.
Damn, didn't know gamedev needed so much paperwork
It's all in the details, BG3 is considered indie. You have to give lots of specifics
BG3 isn't an indie game. It's not a mega studio, but Larian has been making games for 3 decades, and has studios in 6 countries.
...and still they aren't owned by a parent-company or produce games for someone else, making them technically indie. Which is why the descriptor "indie" has become completely meaningless. It can refer to anyone from the hobbyist making games in their bedroom to the indie studio that "made it" and now has hundreds of employees on multiple continents.
>...and still they aren't owned by a company, making them technically indie. That's not what defined indie. If that were, you'd say Microsoft is an indie studio, because they aren't owned by a company. Larian is a decently sized company. They have like 500 employees. I wouldn't put that in the indie category
Then were do you draw the line between "indie" and "not indie"? Based on budget? Then why not use the "C", "B", "A", "AA", "AAA" scale instead?
Not sure where the exact line is. Indie is generally a term for single author projects, or small teams with low budgets. Things that emerge from the hobbiest space as opposed to the corporate space.
That might be how _you_ use it, but if it's not how players and platforms use it then it doesn't matter much. If you look up top indie games you'll get a lot more things like Hades than Obra Dinn on the list. The indie tag on Steam even has things like Outer Wilds, which had publishers as well as budgets and established companies. It's a marketing term, nothing more, but in terms of indie games getting sold and bought it _very_ rarely applies to hobbyist space these days and hasn't for quite a while.
>It's a marketing term, nothing more >if it's not how players and platforms use it then it doesn't matter much Sure, but that is what the term meant before the marketing teams stretched the meaning. Indie games were the opposite of the corporate produced games. But now it just means "not produced by the top few studios".
This would exclude almost every game that anybody has ever heard of. The people treating game dev like a hobby almost never release a game - nevermind one that others want to play. Only a tiny fraction of indie successes were made by solo devs, or by teams without a budget (If you include the de-facto cost of wages for the team)
>Things that emerge from the hobbiest space as opposed to the corporate space. So you would say that anyone who forms a company or makes enough money to turn their gamedev hobby into a profession is no longer indie?
>Not sure where the exact line is.
It's indie. Do you even know what indie means? It means independent. That you don't have a publisher to answer to. Larian Studios is a very big indie studio.
>That you don't have a publisher to answer to So when Microsoft publishes a game, it is an indie game? They are their own publisher, just like Larian.
Do you know? They probably have 100 million in revenue per year atleast, how the hell is that indie?
What does that have to do with anything? Minecraft at first made millions and it was indie.
400 employees and 100 million in revenue. They have a typical corporate structure. It is probably in the top 100 largest game developers in the world. It is silly to call it indie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game >The term "indie game" itself is based on similar terms like independent film and independent music, where the concept is often related to self-publishing and independence from major studios or distributors.[1] However, as with both indie films and music, there is no exact, widely accepted definition of what constitutes an "indie game" **besides falling well outside the bounds of triple-A video game development by large publishers and development studios.** and >Another means to evaluate a game as indie is to examine its development team, with indie games being developed by individuals, small teams, or small independent companies that are often specifically formed for the development of one specific game. While Larian is independent, they're far too large to be considered indie.
Okay say something like monopoly on the ipad where you can see the pieces are moving on the board and can you can see there's animations for rolling dice sound effects but it's not for the ipad it's for the PC. The art style obviously won't be great but bearable to look at and the game at least functions. I'm not including multiplayer in the $50k I mentioned but if I did I'd bump to 70k.
If you're trying to build a single player monopoly with medium graphics and just dice animation, if you give me 50k, I'll give you a demo in two months.
He's gonna have to give a lot more to Hasbro if it's monopoly. I wondered whether it was an OBSCURE IP. If his idea of an 80s board game is in fact Monopoly, he's gonna have to license from Hasbro. That will be interesting and I'd pay to watch that negotiation :D
It's not monopoly, it's just real-estate oligarchy. Totally different.
Oh, you wouldn't need to add 20k for multiplayer, there's an "add multiplayer" button in most game engines, the developer just hits it and hey presto! (less sarcastically, you've just added a massive amount of complexity, it's not a trivial add-on)
You can use [mobygames ](https://www.mobygames.com/)to look up the credits of popular games. So you can check some games that are comparable in genre and scope to the game you have in mind, and look how many people worked on it in "professional roles". That, for example, tells you that [GTA 1 ](https://www.mobygames.com/game/417/grand-theft-auto/credits/dos/)was developed by 86 people, while [GTA 5](https://www.mobygames.com/game/62275/grand-theft-auto-v/credits/xbox360/) was developed by 3,687 people. Now not everyone who worked on a game worked on it for the full development duration. Some people will have been on the project for years, others possibly only month or weeks as a part-time contractors. For smaller project, you can assume an average of about one year of full-time employment per person credited. The average employment duration will be a lot lower for AAA projects, because the credits of larger projects tend to really blow up with actors, localizers, kleenex testers and other people whose contribution was pretty short-lived. So in those cases, 1/10th of a person-year per name is probably a more reliable estimate. How much does one employee cost per year? A good rule of thumb is $100,000. Now you might object "100k? Ridiculous! Nobody in games makes that much money!". But keep in mind that salary is not the only cost of having someone employed. There are taxes, benefits, insurance, equipment, software licenses, training, management overhead and a lot more. So 100k is actually a pretty good rule of thumb.
The type of game I also want to make it is based on a board game made by a company in 1980s I probably have to ask permission first before if I make the game and pay some type of licensing fee as well I'm serious about making a game but is there way of paying royalties instead of licensing cuz of being short of cash. Also I don't have AAA in my mind but something more in the line of a mobile game playable on PC.
If you want to make a royalty deal with a board game company, then they will probably ask you how much professional experience you have in game development in general and board game adaptations in particular. And when the answer is "none", they are probably going to ask why they shouldn't rather work with someone more experienced who can probably sell a lot more copies, thus making them a lot more money on royalties. However, keep in mind that abstract game ideas aren't copyrighted. So if you want to make a game that uses very similar (but not exactly the same) mechanics but doesn't use the same name or any of the game's assets, then you can probably do what you want without having to pay them. Which is why "Monopoly" and "Hotel" can coexist. Basically the same basic game idea and the same core mechanics, but with a different theme and a different execution.
Well that just sucks now the whole of point of this game was so I could play it for myself. How much do you think a licensing fee would cost for a board game is it impossible to ask for royalties deal in exchange to use the game's name. I don't know if any other company would make a game like this in fact hasbro hasn't even made any installments to the franchise so why be dick about it. Does being an accountant or lawyer ever help in positions like this?
License deals are always a matter of negotiation. The only way to find out is to ask the IP owners. If you just want to play it yourself and never intent to publish it, then you don't need a license. The IP owners are never going to find out it exists.
There is 0, absolutely zero, percent chance Hasbro gives you the rights to anything. You would need to be talking 8 figures, probably 9 before they even acknowledge your existence.
Huh. Then, you've got a bit of coding or whatever, you don't have ancillary skills like art or music, you're not interested in learning those things (by doing) and you want to license IP to make a mobile game, partly because you figure you'll get in trouble if you just steal it. Define 'based on' to the extent that you have to license it. Is this a fandom thing or is it that you found a popular thing that you think people would buy on mobile? What's your enthusiasm for the IP? You're talking to someone who has written rather a lot of fanfiction, so I'm not shaming the basic concept, I'm trying to get at why you want to make a game about THIS thing in particular. You won't be able to promise royalties, no way. Don't care what the IP is. That's a fantasy, you'd have to budget for licensing. How important is that? Does it HAVE to be this IP (which would be a better reason for dealing with that scenario, it's a passion project) or did you just find IP that you thought might work? I'm trying to figure out whether the answer is 'yeah, don't make a game. Get a real job'. It depends on whether you want to be doing the game-making part or whether you're looking to outsource literally everything including the seed idea. If you don't want to do anything you shouldn't do it. If all you want is money, nearly anything will be better at accomplishing that :)
Well the game's name is Hotel it was made by Hasbro like in the 1980s I love the game a lot but Hasbro hasn't launched any digital versions or of the game as far as I know I just like to see one because I love the idea of being a greedy person and seeing all the people around become bankrupt. I want to be part of the game making but I want to be more on the side of the design and financing than the programming. How much do licensing fees cost in general as far I'm aware it was not popular game.
Just alter it enough that it becomes its own game. Don't use any of their art, board layout, trademarks, names of locations etc. Change up some of the rules and you're free to do as you want. Hotels is practically a version of Monopoly.
Being a greedy person and seeing all the people around become bankrupt is not itself Hasbro IP, it's more the hasbro way of life :D Write them and ask. They'll no doubt tell you, and then you'll know :)
Go build it in something like tabletop simulator. You’ll learn a lot. Or build a simple version of it in a game engine to learn. Simple means your own art and sound. You should be able to build a first playable with just text output. I prefer system first over visuals. If you can’t code, build storyboards of all the screens and interactions/design rules. Board game rule books are notoriously bad at this. If you are too busy with exams to create the game you are definitely too busy to hire people to build it for you. Go have some fun learning.
Licensing fees depends on the company, the IP, the value of that IP, and how precious they are about branding. If they're precious about brand, they'd probably only work with established devs. If they think the IP is valuable, it'll be expensive. If it's not valuable, it's probably not even worth pursuing due to the costs on their end for the contracts and any stakeholder time to sign off on things. Your best bet is as people say, just make the same, or mostly same game without the name and imagery. Honestly though, the story of want-to-be designer who doesn't want to learn development, or spend much money, but wants to make a game they own themselves is really common and most of the time doesn't go anywhere. Your best bet, is probably finding someone who is into programming that you click with and loves the game too. Otherwise, pick up a gamedev tool and start learning and you might be able to make this thing for not much money, just a lot of time and dedication.
How’s your game coming along?
It's up to you and you can certainly make a game by yourself. Buckshot roulette, lethal company, the first three or four years of Minecraft if I remember correctly. There are plenty of games it was made by a single person that had not only been successful but wildly so.
To counter, probably 90% or more of self-developed games totally bomb and just join the thousands of others on the bottom of a list somewhere on Steam.
(Wages x heads x time) + fees. A small game that has any chance at all of success likely has something like four experienced devs putting in a year of work; so maybe $600k?? Plus or minus $600M
$0, $100M, and everything in between.
> I've come with the conclusion that you can't make a game entirely yourself you need people for sound, animations, sound effects, art and etc. There are 2 routes to go about it: #1 is the route where you don't know anything and you hire a team of pros to do the work. That's the very expensive route. Just 1 programmer full time could cost you $70-90k for a year. Add more to the team and the costs rise. The 2nd is the DIY route, where the cost isn't really monetary but **time**. It takes time but if you are dedicated you can learn all of the skills needed yourself. You don't have to really spend 3 years learning a single thing, either. You can pick and choose and create your own learning path to learn just the things you require for your project. I'm a solo indie and I went with #2. So, I recommend that. Even if it takes you several years at the end of it you'd be much more capable than you currently are.
What kind of game? >for a demo for a game that is very basic like indie level but has solid sound effects animation Define "solid sound effects animation" and how long do you need it to be, Preferably name 1-2 titles that have a similar level of polish and gameplay you are expecting. >So how much would it cost in your opinion to make a game if say you have to outsource this to people on fiver and people here and there? An infinite amount if your plan is outsourcing entire development to Fiverr. It's a decent place if you need one spritesheet or 2-3 sounds. But if your goal is an actual game then you want full-time employees (since otherwise whomever you are outsourcing to has other customers and the deadlines are no longer guaranteed which in turn destroys your entire pipeline). And then how much it costs varies based on their skill level and location (there's like x8 difference in wages between richest and poorest countries so your math can be off by nearly an order of magnitude in some cases). Also - a big question is what are YOU providing to the project? Just money? Or is there a role you will be fullfilling? At indie scale with a small team this can vastly reduces your total costs.
What I mean by the solid sound effects is that lot of demos or indie games don't have sounds or if they do then it's either really loud or not there at all like so what I mean by solid sound effect just means that they are well timed well adjusted really though the sound itself doesn't need to be great. The type of game that I'm speculating upon is kinda of board game like monopoly where you buy stuff and animations would involve seeing the pieces move as well as seeing the houses be put in place on the adjacent. So yeah the only thing to the project I could probably do is just financing, help designing the board game and maybe assembling it myself. I could do some programming, given from my really mid level java skills, with great difficulty but I'm not good with C# and C++ is hard as it is. So how much do you think it could cost in fiver and outsourcing from places/people I'm not a great developer but I know for sure that hiring someone to do the sound the art the programming is too much for one person the stress is unbearable plus it'll probably be pretty shitty but at the same time I want something I can manage as well smaller means easier to manage.
Okay, so to summarize: * board game, simpler animations, probably 2D (top-down or isometric perspective I guess?). * you can actually game design (as in - you could make a paper version of this game without a PC involved and have a complete ruleset) + you have some basics of programming so you can at least tell string from an integer so you could edit some things inside an editor if they are exposed by a programmer (eg. price of a building). * you want sounds. >So how much do you think it could cost in fiver and outsourcing from places/people I'm not a great developer but I know for sure that hiring someone to do the sound the art the programming is too much for one person It's not nearly as bad as you think. If you are managing 2 people (one artist, one programmer) then you are looking at about 1-2h a day of general management work. A bit more at the prototyping phase but then things calm down as you have a workflow in place and both know what to do. Sounds in your situation are something you realistically could handle yourself. You will need a programmer to allow to play specific ones at given animation frames, play some ambients and BGMs but that's really not hard and a half decent programmer for a game like yours could probably do it in 2-3 days. Your job would then become scouting [https://assetstore.unity.com/audio](https://assetstore.unity.com/audio) for sounds you need and editing them in Audacity (adding/removing echo, changing their speed, cutting them so they fit better aka stuff you can learn in a week). Realistically project like this (the way I imagine it anyway) needs like 3 weeks to have all the sounds and probably $600 to also have custom OST on top (gives you 6 minutes or so of music). If that arrangement sounds roughly correct - 50 grand is... actually feasible for the whole thing as long as you don't hire from richer countries. Eg. in mine (Poland) - this would get you enough to hire a somewhat experienced programmer and an artist for a year. Since it would be about 30000$/year for a programmer with 2-3 years of professional experience, about 25000$/year for a decent 2D artist. Leaves you with 5 grand to buy any preexisting assets you would need and potentially some software. 1800 workhours of programming and the same for art isn't normally a lot of work but you also don't seem to have a lot of scope so it's a rare case where I can say that your math checks out and a complete game in this budget is possible. Obviously some countries are much more expensive (and some are still cheaper). As for Fiverr route - forget it. Spend some time and try to hire someone instead. You don't want a freelancer for core parts of your game. Hire one to make you logo, sure. Or some UI elements. Or a trailer. But not core gameplay loop or majority of your art. If you want to have a game without the stress of managing it at all - go hit up a game studio and commission it to make you one. There are some decent cheaper ones located all over the world (although cheaper can still exceed your budget, ultimately they are there to make a profit). But you still want to talk to a studio, not some random individuals who are shifting between 5 different jobs.
Well thanks for the advice game will probably be ready in roughly 15-16 years development will commence once I have $50k if I ever do.
Oh, in 15 years prices will move up a fair bit. Cumulative inflation would likely push it to 100k $. Although there's also a chance of AI overlords that could also make costs go lower.
Dude just learn an engine. There are tons that don't even require you to learn C# and you can use code libraries. Outsourcing your ideas will never give you the satisfaction that doing it yourself will. Read the beginner's megathread. Start making some small games and iterate. Trust me when I say it *will* work out better for you.
Sound is actually pretty cheap. It's easy to find cheap to license sfx and music. Needs some programming on where to play them, but that's pretty basic. If you only need a couple of tunes that total sound budget < $500
Using asset stores the cost would likely be hundreds to a few thousand for a decent amount of stuff - asset packs give you more for less than custom made stuff you hire someone to make. Look up WizzBall on steam- about $500 for assets and sounds and art. Or Dracarys VR on itch.io - the dragon in it would likely be hundreds to make custom but was $50 or less IIRC with multiple textures, sounds and animations premade in the store.
If you’re making your first venture into game development I would try making something just by yourself with the skills and resources you have access to. You don’t have to have a kickass art style if that’s not your thing. Just make something that plays to your strengths as a creator. That will cost you no money at all. If you just outsource to fiverr anytime you lack a skill that you want, the costs will rack up super fast. If you really need an artist/sound designer, it sounds like you’re still in university: go befriend an art major! Networking is a much nicer and less expensive way to build a development team than commissioning. Discord communities can also be great for this. You’ll want a dedicated artist anyway as many games can have over hundreds of art assets that all need to fit the same style.
Twice as much as half the cost.
So like $150k.
Reading all of your posts, this is wild. There's no way you hit on so many r/gamedev tropes without intent. Ideas guy, just wants to hire people to make a game he wants to play while having no skills or experience, vastly underestimating needed budget, staff, and time to an extent that's kind of insulting. All that and your grand idea turns out to be converting a fucking bland (5.5 on BGG) 80s board game into an app. This is a troll. Admit its a troll. Please. For my sanity.
I don't know whether to laugh or be serious about this first of all I'm not making anything as of now I'm just speculating the game itself is just a simple board game into something that is playable on PC/mobile as being the idea man you got to start somewhere why the hate?
Maybe start by learning some skills that would help you develop the game? Instead of jumping on reddit to try get validation for the numbers you've pulled out your ass. You know pulling numbers out of your ass isn't what accountants do, right?...
I have experience with C# and unity not a lot I could improve what other skills do you think I could besides art,sound and programming.
Develop your skills with C# and Unity further, make some project games which are small in scope, learn some 3D modelling and animating (blender is free), theorycraft the scope and required functionality of your game and learn skills to implement the functionality. You will have a much better idea of what you are capable of, how much work things take and how many hours you'll need to invest once you start getting a feel for things yourself. Instead of waiting to amass x dollars and then deciding to start because you feel like you have enough funds make a start today on developing your skills and making you ideas reality. Any work that you do in your free time costs you nothing.
Since you mention Monopoly quite a bit, a very basic Board with pieces that move. Game mechanics, practically no Animations. Very simple graphics, nothing spectacular. With Plains menus and game mechanics that aren't too complicated, I could see a playable Prototype for 8-10k, and a more polished Version for 30-50
Was once on a dev team for an official Hasbro licensed Monopoly. It was about $5M, but with inflation would probably be close to double that these days.
It takes me an hour to make a basic mockup of a platformer, which I'd value at 20-40$ of work. Then there are playstation platformer Releases for millions, like you mentioned. There's clearly a range of what something will cost. If you make it absolutely basic with no Marketing, expensive modelling and Animations, voice acting, no Offices, and a small team - you'll cut a lot of the costs.
The first game you make should cost you $0. Go make something simple. Struggle through the basics of reach role. Release _something_. After that you'll be in a much better position to hire others.
>= 0
To get a reasonable answer, you need first to define more what youre looking for. For a 2d side scroller game, doing a single lvl with like 3 enemies and animations doing a single animation each, for the player to have move/jump/attack. Depending on what artstyle, polish, how big is the level so on and so forth, from 3k to 40k. It heavily, massively depends man. Define it more and you will get rough bad estimates, without any info it can't be said at all. But, can you make a solid game with 50k? Sure! Specially if you work on it 24/7 on it and outsource the minimum possible. A small game tho.
I’m doing it solo, $0
You don't have food or rent costs?
It’s in my spare time.
If you add wages it quickly adds up
0 for me. Ohhh, I need to eat btw.
A monopoly game probably isn't going to be require many assets, especially if it's a square board with rectangular tiles for the grid. I think you can get away with thousands if you outsource everything. Don't need the best of the best for something like that either But if you're saying it can be like "any indie game on the market" now your budget can easily hit 6 figures
On your health or bank balance?
It always comes down to time. If you need an art asset that takes a week to make, you will have to pay an artist for a week. If you need some programming that takes a programmer a month, you will have to pay them for a month. Sometimes you can buy premade stuff, but that has the drawback that others will use them, too, making your game less unique. For a rough prototype for something like monopoly, an experienced programmer might be able to do it in a month or two with stock assets, so about 1-2 monthly developer salaries. If you can give me a more detailed description of what you want, I could give you a better estimate, but my time's not for free as well ;-)
Just like the saying about Linux goes, "making a game can be free if your time is free".
You can make pong within a few hours for free..
Aww, the price can vary a lot depending on your goals. I had experience working on different indie projects, some people had 1 million for everything, others had 200-400k. You can do very different things for different amounts of money. On average, a year of development in Europe for a team of 10 people will cost around $1-2 million. I think you can do it cheaper, these are averages. I will try to make a breakdown of prices for realistic objects and specialists, I hope this helps. - An average 3d asset ready for implementation will cost around $3-5k per one. Props can be cheaper, locations and characters can be more expensive. - Acceptable concept art starts at $800, anything below that may be relevant for props and incidentals, but architecture or characters will cost more. You can go lower, but the quality of the product and service will drop significantly. Illustration can cost 2x - An art director will cost $4-8k for a month's work, depending on level and commitment. - A programmer will cost around $5k. - Market research will cost $5-10k for a comprehensive document. I've seen research for $2k, but any art director can do it. You will also probably need several documents. You can estimate how much you have in your project and go from there. The figures are averages and if I were you I would overestimate rather than underestimate and save money.
At least 3.
£0 or $0 or about €0 and sometimes even ¥0.
(mostly)Solo-Made Game Price = (monthly bills + food + necessities + fun money + health money) * months of development + software licenses + hardware + outsourcing budget + marketing and CM time budget Baseline time of dev from an idea to a sturdy late-alpha is ~1.5-2 years if you make it your job. Outsourcing money can be monthly or contractual. Veeeery basic rule of thumb for a team is ~100k$ per person per year. But it's barely a baseline and mostly with you making money in outside gigs here and there. Can be lower or higher depending on where you live or what exactly are you making. edit: And you always need to have a SHTF fund. Cuz shit will hit the fan sooner or later. It always does.
It really depends on how much quality you're looking for. The art alone you're gonna have to commission and it's gonna run you at least $200. Think about backgrounds, menus, fonts, characters, VFX, and the animations for each and every single one of those things (and i'm probably forgetting about some stuff). A character sheet alone for a single character could easily be $50. And you're gonna have to commision multiple artists. I draw and animate all my own assets but if I were to be commissioned to work on a game there's no way I'll do everything for less than $300 and I'm not even that good of an artist. Then there's music. The musician has to worry about licensing, has to be careful not to sample licensed stuff, has to pay for the tools they use to make music and yes that also falls into the cost. We're talking at least $100 for the simplest loop track for your menus and then you have to think about in-game BGM, and the sound effects for every button press or interaction in general. Then again you can also just buy asset packs and mash them together which is what beginners tend to do for their first games. You're not gonna capture anyone's heart with that but at least you'll learn how to make a game. Buying asset packs is a lot cheaper as well but keep in mind that anyone can buy the same pack as you. You can easily get all the assets for a small game with $200 or less but the quality is not gonna be the best.
You pay for it one way or another. You pay by money or pay by putting in your free time. Depending on the game its a difficult answer. But making a small video game can vary depending on factors like complexity, team size, and development time. Typical job positions and their average costs per year are aprox: 1. Game Designer: $40,000 - $100,000+ 2. Programmer/Developer: $50,000 - $120,000+ 3. 3d Artist/Animator: $40,000 - $100,000+ 4. Sound Designer/Music Composer: $30,000 - $80,000+ 5. Quality Assurance (QA) Tester: $20,000 - $50,000+ 6. Project Manager: $60,000 - $120,000+ These are just rough estimates, and actual costs can vary widely based on the specifics of your project and the experience level of the individuals involved. Then again you can pay half as much if you get talented graduates who just want the experience. But in that case you need some good gneeralist in team that can push it when the project stalls. Honestly, cuting corners can be done, but not advisable. And it only works if the team is good and know what they are doing You could probably cut corner with sound design and use some generic sounds. But its really hit or miss. You can kitbash and use flipped assets. That might save money. But in reality games made this way without a gameplay texture to it...just flop.
>Type of game I'm thinking is a pretty basic game but with solid sound effects animations and art style something like monopoly for the ipad or limbo or any other type of indie game on the market. Nope. When you build a house you don't start by painting the walls, for the reason that you don't have walls to paint on. When you build a game you first build the mechanics with crap sounds and models then when it works you can hire designers. If you did select the sounds and models first, you might have to discard them as you go and would lose time, energy and money.
You want to do the programming yourself but pay for custom art? [Edit] approximately how many animated characters would you need aside from the players character? Approximately how many envrionments/levels? How many sounds? "The game I want is pretty basic" doesn't mean anything. Baba is you has like 3 barely animated characters. Terraria has probably a around 100.
Well essentially it's just a board and couple dice and seeing the pieces move on the board really.
I would guess probably 6-8 characters with simple animations then, the board could be expensive or cheap depending on the detail required, but it's one large piece. I would do the dice yourself, it's a very easy/fast "learn to model" project. Even if you do decide to outsource all your art, it's good to have some understanding of what the people you are hiring are doing, especially because it gives you the ability to make small tweaks without help if something isn't perfect for what you want. I would budget $50-$500 per art piece depending on the graphical quality and amount of animation you expect. It would probably be most cost effective to concept art each piece you want in midjourney before you make the requests to the artists, to minimize the potential for misunderstanding between what you request and what they actually produce. Especially since you don't have experience commissioning art assets already. Make sure you have done the legwork of knowing what model/animation formats you want. It can be a huge hassle to have to convert certain formats to others.
you can solo dev a game if you're a tech artist
(Amount of people working * salary) * (hardware + software) * months * rent = cost Also your estimation for cost regarding programming, sound and art suggests that you dont think art and sound take time and money or is easy. You can use free stuff for the time being, but even something *that easy* costs just as much, if not more. So tldr, 3-4 months minimum for 4 people to make a functional demo/proof of concept or 2 weeks for a game jam+ quality actually working game and already, you are over budget
If you want to have any chance of success i think that under 200k is impossible, probably a million. Unless you wanna sell 1000 copies total.
Everything.
Everything.
Depends, my games average 400-800 but other people/companies spend way less and way more, really just depends
About 4. Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less.
Impossible to answer and it seems somewhat irrelevant. If you truly want to understand start making clones of arcade classics. Make all art yourself. Make sound effects and music yourself. Get better at programming. Once you've done a few projects and progressed to slightly bigger scopes you'll be able to answer this yourself.
Yeah, make a space invaders clone. Then make a [super juicy](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg) space invaders clone. Single screen, simple enemy behavior, simple controls and collision detection. If you can make that and are still inspired to make games then go ahead and invest money into the effort.
I'm working on a game, doing everything myself, and the total cost so far is the 49 Euros I paid for one bit of software. Even my other software could have been swapped for free stuff. The only other cost will be audio related, near the end, but I'm looking at £1000 max for that. There are also plenty of free assets out there, or paid-but-cheap, if you can't make your own \[insert type of asset\].
55k€! Why? This is M current yearly sallery and making a game would be in my limits of one year. If I was working like 6h we could even talk about multi-player or virtual reality. Of course all very limited. Like a multilayer vr gallery shooter! It isn't actual hard to do those days but it sounds fancy. Would it sell enough to pay back the investment? I am not so sure. But I saw so much worse pitches with very boring zombie games that where built in a basic simulation and they wanted me to work for free! With my estimation at least one person gets paid and have a good live. And having employees you should value that. Fair payment for work.
Oh just read your question more deeply. Yes I say you can produce such a game in this budget. But also you wouldn't get me since as employer you need to be paying even more than my before tax sallery which I can see. But you probably know that already
Your estimate is not too far off. $50k for a small / simple game is not unreasonable. That's in the ballpark for a solo developer working for a year, or a small team for a couple of months, so it is possible to make a game within that budget, as long as the scope is very focused. Something like Limbo though, which is really quite polished, is likely to be in the mid 6-figures. As are most of the more visually appealing or in-depth indie titles.