157 réponses à ce sujet

[Alodar]

FuturePasTimeCE wrote...

a video game is probably way easier to produce than a movie... so if it had a 50 million dollar budget, it's bound to be epic. movies are just about the same cost.

I'm curious as to what leads you to believe that a video game is way easier to produce than a movie?
(Keeping in mind that most movies supply on average 2 hours of entertainment and have a 6 week shooting schedule where a video game like Dragon Age, for example, provided most people with at least 45 hours of entertainment  (My playthroughs hover around 90)) and had a 5 year + development cycle.)






Alodar 

[RinpocheSchnozberry]

No more than $15-20 bucks.

[Bullets McDeath]

Five million space ruples.

[Wulfram]

It's forged on the Anvil of the Void from the souls of casteless dwarves.

[Faz432]

No point in having a huge budget if it's just going to be spent on marketing devices.



Pay people's wages, get the job done.

[SteveGarbage]

Well, let's think about it: as of February 2010, DA:O had sold more than 3 million copies, so we'll say that as of today it was maybe 4 million copies. If each of those sold for an average of $25 (since retailers of course are paying less than customers because of markup) - that would be $100 million.

Using this very rough estimate, we can assume that EA/BioWare probably wants to make a profit on the sales so the budget would be less than that $100 million. I'd say probably not more than half of that, and probably less. I mean even if there were 50 people working in development for a year with an average salary of $50,000 that's $2.5 mil right there. Whether salaries and stuff are included in dev costs, I don't know.

According to this Web site, which outlines some of the most expensive games developed, the lowest on that list are around $40 million - although I expect that site is probably not comprehensive and is also two years old.

If BioWare anticipates selling equal or more copies as Origins - I would estimate that the budget may be somewhere in the $20-30 million mark - but that's based on a lot of hunches and estimations and I have no insider knowledge of the costs of game development. For all I know it could be less than $5 million.

[AlanC9]

25% more sales on the back end might be kind of high. IIRC the typical sales curve falls off very steeply.

[Sir JK]

Faz432 wrote...

No point in having a huge budget if it's just going to be spent on marketing devices.

Pay people's wages, get the job done.

Pity they need those marketing devices to keep paying people's wages then?

[cinderburster]

FuturePasTimeCE wrote...

a video game is probably way easier to produce than a movie... so if it had a 50 million dollar budget, it's bound to be epic. movies are just about the same cost.

Bioware has far fewer resources to work with than a major movie undertaking, very talented and very overworked people to organize as opposed to making contracts with other studios to provide certain effects and sequences (I'm looking at something made by, say, Universal that contracts with ILM for their monsters), they have to hire VAs, build environments, build characters, skin, animate, and re-skin characters (if the first skin looked bad in the end), fix bugs, make certain animations queue correctly, write lines upon lines upon lines of code that give us the options we all love so much in their games. 

And I'm just talking about the hero and his companions.

Now imagine they have to do all of that, for all of the monsters we fight.

Every NPC we run across.

And for every person the game is a different experience because we don't all make the same choices.

All within a tight budget that doesn't allow a lot of wiggle room,
unlike the film industry, where movies frequently go overbudget and we
just never hear about it.

Everyone that watches Avatar, for instance, gets the same experience.  It cost approximately $280 million to make, after post-production.  It's about three hours long. Bioware most likely has less than $50 million to produce a game that can take more than a day to play through and complete, with multiple endings, and multiple decisions.

There hasn't been a feature film made in a very long time that only cost $50 million to make and was worth the price of the ticket to watch--referring, of course, to movies made entirely digitally, since we're comparing the movie industry to the gaming industry now.

Modifié par cinderburster, 22 septembre 2010 - 06:01 .

[Gerudan]

DA2 will probably have a decent budget, of a few millions, I would guess. Perhaps even as much as 10 Millions, which would be quite a lot for a game, that is in development for hardly over a year. 

But there is also no way, that it will have a giant budget of 30 or 40 Millions, RPGs just don't sell enough for that. 
One must also see, that a lot of this titles on these "budget lists" were failures and often in development for 5 years or longer, while DA2 has a very short development time. 

The devs (or at least the few, that really know the budget) would probably laugh over our assumptions, though. 

[SteveGarbage]

Here's a Wiki article on game development costs (appears to be at least mostly reputable) which also includes a link to an IGN article about game dev costs.

The IGN article estimates average development cost around $10 million on next gen consoles. However, with that being an average, my guess is that Dragon Age, with a lot of content (40+ hours for Origins) and a lot of voice acting (even more in DA2) that development costs for DA2 are going to probably be well above that mark.

In my earlier post I guessed that the profit per unit for the publisher would be about $25 - the IGN article states that is actually closer to around $16 per unit. Which means if DA2 expects to sell around the same or slightly better than Origins, that is going to mean around $65ish million.

Therefore, I feel a lot better about my original guess (above) of a dev budget around $20-30 million.

[SirShreK]

SteveGarbage wrote...

Here's a Wiki article on game development costs (appears to be at least mostly reputable) which also includes a link to an IGN article about game dev costs.

The IGN article estimates average development cost around $10 million on next gen consoles. However, with that being an average, my guess is that Dragon Age, with a lot of content (40+ hours for Origins) and a lot of voice acting (even more in DA2) that development costs for DA2 are going to probably be well above that mark.

In my earlier post I guessed that the profit per unit for the publisher would be about $25 - the IGN article states that is actually closer to around $16 per unit. Which means if DA2 expects to sell around the same or slightly better than Origins, that is going to mean around $65ish million.

Therefore, I feel a lot better about my original guess (above) of a dev budget around $20-30 million.

Steve is the single most smart person the forum after the Devs. And I mean it seriously.

Modifié par SirShreK, 22 septembre 2010 - 06:48 .

[Hurrrr]

Merced256 wrote...

Well, the real cost is the soul of CRPGs.

What..?

Cheap but I loled about.

[SteveGarbage]

SirShreK wrote...

SteveGarbage wrote...

Here's a Wiki article on game development costs (appears to be at least mostly reputable) which also includes a link to an IGN article about game dev costs.

The IGN article estimates average development cost around $10 million on next gen consoles. However, with that being an average, my guess is that Dragon Age, with a lot of content (40+ hours for Origins) and a lot of voice acting (even more in DA2) that development costs for DA2 are going to probably be well above that mark.

In my earlier post I guessed that the profit per unit for the publisher would be about $25 - the IGN article states that is actually closer to around $16 per unit. Which means if DA2 expects to sell around the same or slightly better than Origins, that is going to mean around $65ish million.

Therefore, I feel a lot better about my original guess (above) of a dev budget around $20-30 million.

Steve is the single most smart person the forum after the Devs. And I mean it seriously.

I like this guy,  I'm gonna keep him around, heh.

[JrayM16]

The current average budget for what is considered to be a AAA game with a 1-2 year dev cycle is around $20 million. So I'd imagine DA2's budget is somewhere around there.

[Bryy_Miller]

simfamSP wrote...

What I do get annoyed about is how some of the forum users have no faith in Bioware's financial status. Any Idea that comes up will have a reply saying 'They have a limited budget", surely their budget of $30.000.000 will be enough to cover alot of things.

A lot but not everything. 

[JrayM16]

I think alot of people who are asking these questions are doing it because they think the new direction Bioware is taking which they don't like is due to some kind of budgetary constraint as opposed to genuine direction.

[Agent_Dark_]

Mike Laidlaw wrote...

Bryy_Miller wrote...

Mike Laidlaw wrote...
so we, as developers, will pick our battles.

I think you guys may want to rethink how you phrase things on the forums. Naysayers can and will use anything you guys write against you.

Why? That's exactly what happens. You make choices and you go with your gut.

If I have to self edit to the point where I'm too terrified to say anything, I might as well not post.

Confirmed: DA2 will almost entirely be focused on battles and combat and very little else.

[Mike Laidlaw]

Agent_Dark_ wrote...

Mike Laidlaw wrote...

Bryy_Miller wrote...

Mike Laidlaw wrote...
so we, as developers, will pick our battles.

I think you guys may want to rethink how you phrase things on the forums. Naysayers can and will use anything you guys write against you.

Why? That's exactly what happens. You make choices and you go with your gut.

If I have to self edit to the point where I'm too terrified to say anything, I might as well not post.

Confirmed: DA2 will almost entirely be focused on battles and combat and very little else.

Good thing we did all that work to make combat better, then!

[Agent_Dark_]

Mike Laidlaw wrote...

Agent_Dark_ wrote...

Confirmed: DA2 will almost entirely be focused on battles and combat and very little else.

Good thing we did all that work to make combat better, then!

And verified!  Someone update the facts thread with this stuff!

[Sylvius the Mad]

Mike Laidlaw wrote...

Good thing we did all that work to make combat better, then!

That's a value judgment.

You made combat more reactive.  You made combat different.  You (or anyone else) cannot reasonably say you made it better without appealing to some standard of measurement.

[AlexXIV]

Well I guess it wouldn't help much to announce the cost if people have no idea what costs what. I mean people would only go around guessing, claiming Bioware wasting money because they simply don't know which things swallow alot of money but still are important. Anyway, according to sales numbers I'd guess 50 - 100 million for DA:O not counting expansions and DLCs.