Still working on an
I gather Halo 3 just came out.
How much did it cost to develop?
A news story on the wire quotes a development cost of $30 million for Microsoft, with another $30 million or so in marketing and bonuses, for a launch cost of $60 million. Which implies very high profit margins for a successful game.
But, the story also claims it took 300 elite programmers three years to put the game together, which is plausible.
So, an elite programmer can be had to $33,000 gross per year?
I don't think so.
You might think that this is because most of the programming is done somewhere off-shore at very low cost, but the Washington development lab has 100 employees.
So even if the foreigners were free, that is still only $100,000 per person per year.
That is impossible: with payroll taxes, benefits and overhead it would imply elite programmer pay of only $50-60k per year, and I don't think you get that in the Seattle area.
Someone is off by a factor of 2-3 or more on the development cost, and the article writers and publishers should have realised something was smelly about this story.
Comments
A staff of 300 isn't something totally implausible for a large project like Halo. Most of those would be engine programmers, however. The bulk of them would be designers, concept artists, modelers, etc., who are typically paid less.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | September 25, 2007 12:46 PM
Erm, I mean "wouldn't be engine programmers" above. Sorry. :(
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | September 25, 2007 12:47 PM
Sure, but gross costs for an employee are typically somewhere between double their take home pay and $50k on top of their take home pay.
Numbers just don't add up, even if a fair fraction of the staff are doing medium pay grunt work rather than 3l33t programming.
Maybe if most of it was off-shore, but the Wired article claims 100 staff in the Washington studio, and that alone should be costing them over $10 million per year.
Posted by: Steinn Sigurdsson | September 25, 2007 1:08 PM
Most likely this is combining the total length of time with the total number of people, but grossly overestimating the number of person years. I've got no idea about this specific case, but it's the sort of thing that frequently happens: someone will issue an ambiguous press release that says "Our new flagship product took ten years to develop. One thousand software engineers worked on it." and this leads to a ten thousand person-year estimate in the media.
Posted by: Anonymous | September 25, 2007 3:01 PM
I'm guessing it's 300 peak people. I'm also guessing they included QA staff (which tends to be large), localization (the people who do translation), and so on. Game development is big, but the people resouces often fluctuate greatly over the course of a game.
Posted by: Adam | September 25, 2007 4:16 PM