Budgets?

[Executrix]

What was the budget of your last game? I remember reading that budgets for casual games go from $100,000 to $300,000? Bejewled Twist cost $1,000,000 to make! I find it hard to believe that a budget like that can be made back.

[Polychrome]

Between 0$ and 2500$ (no money spent apart from living expenses).

[ragdollsoft]

Assuming an alternative salary of say... 700k per year, about 1.2 million dollars.

Other than that $600.

[ChrisP]

Heh - if you think $1 million is bad, take a look at some recent "AAA" budgets... Many of them do actually break even, surprisingly enough.

For Mayhem Intergalactic: In terms of actual expenditure, and treating time as free (i.e. no "wages"/"salary"), probably around $800 USD. Can't be bothered looking up exact amounts. That's including cut-price custom audio and a few minor bits of visual art (the rest of the art is programmer art, or donated - thanks DayDream! - or a mixture). Pretty shoe-string.

My next game will undoubtedly cost more, simply because I now realise what a disservice I was doing myself by skimping on quality.

Edit: No revenue share deals with a team, here; everyone except for me was paid up-front and received no royalties. I can't say what the cost would be if I did factor my time in, because I didn't keep a record of how many hours I worked on it, and my work periods were shoved into nooks and crannies around full-time study.

[Musenik]

About $40,000 for DHSGiT, and a large percentage was lawyer fees. The major expense was artwork.

Of course that doesn't include my time on the project (3 years). In final, I've made back my expenses, plus a nice amount, but it hasn't fully recouped the business.

Next game, for sure!

[MFS]

I'll throw in some console numbers. This is just based on my experience so I probably don't cover the whole range (although I doubt there is a much lower bottom.)

DS: 100k - 750k (avg ~ 220k)
Wii: 275k - 2.0m
XBLA: 350k (only 1 title, so I don't have any clue as to the range)

As for the PC side of things, I only have commercial experience in the casual sector. I'd say it's pretty hard to make a competetive title for the portals for under 30k.

[Nexic]

My latest game reached open beta for about $32k ($30k my time, $2k assets). Since then I've spent another $105k on development ($70k my time, $35k assets/other people's time). So total would be about $137k. That doesn't include things like advertising, promotion and operating costs.

[Grey Alien]

That's cool Neil. Hope you've made it back + plenty more.

My first couple of games had tiny budgets but that was years back, my 4th game had a budget of about $2500 (art+music) but made it back 10x over. My 3rd game was higher than $2500 but I can't say due to NDA. My 5th and 6th were made for BFG and had *much* bigger budgets (programmer+artists+music) and my current game has the biggest budget yet. Sorry can't say though. Hope this helps a little bit.

I've learnt that you have to speculate to accumulate. So spend more money (when you know what you are doing) to make better quality and you'll make more money, it's pretty simple.

[Nexic]

Originally Posted by greyalien

That's cool Neil. Hope you've made it back + plenty more.

Yup

Originally Posted by greyalien

I've learnt that you have to speculate to accumulate. So spend more money (when you know what you are doing) to make better quality and you'll make more money, it's pretty simple.

This is something I've learned myself in the last 3 or 4 months. Once you get to a certain level you do have to start spending some money if you want to reach the next milestone.

[manunderground]

I think that's great advice. Too often I see people who have great ideas or technically impressive games who flat out refuse to invest in their projects in terms of art/sound simply because it would cost some money -- and not much money!

[Jack Norton]

Yes definitely. If you always do everything for cheap (ads, gfx, etc) you won't get great revenues

[JGOware]

Originally Posted by Grey Alien

My 5th and 6th were made for BFG and had *much* bigger budgets (programmer+artists+music) and my current game has the biggest budget yet. Sorry can't say though. Hope this helps a little bit.

I would have thought BFG would be using in house talent for all of their assets now?

@Nexic - Refreshing to see a developer count his time as an expense. So many don't.

[ChrisP]

Originally Posted by Grey Alien

I've learnt that you have to speculate to accumulate. So spend more money (when you know what you are doing) to make better quality and you'll make more money, it's pretty simple.

Absolutely agreed, and true in my experience as well.

[Colm]

Originally Posted by Musenik

About $40,000 for DHSGiT, and a large percentage was lawyer fees. The major expense was artwork.

That's without counting your time? How come you needed so much lawyer time - for steam?

[soslo]

Domain of Heroes (ongoing web MMO, daily updates, 1.5 years): approx 150k
Domain of Heroes: Hobo Defense (iPhone): approx 40k
BumbleTales (PC/Mac casual): approx 90k
BumbleTales (iPhone): approx 45k

Edit: Numbers are all-inclusive, and include things like salaries/contracts for everyone. Marketing and business expenses. Servers and hosting fees.

[James C. Smith]

When talking about budgets on indie projects I think it would be helpful to clarify if you pay yourself or not and how many other people on the project are working for free with the promise of a share of the revenue.

[James C. Smith]

Originally Posted by JGOware

I would have thought BFG would be using in house talent for all of their assets now?

@Nexic - Refreshing to see a developer count his time as an expense. So many don't.

It's funny to me that you would post those two points in the same message and not recognize their relationship. Don't you think BFG is doing exactly what Nexic is doing and counting their own people's time as an expense? When I talk about the budgets of the games I work on they include a lot more than the out of pocket expenses we pay contractors. They also include the salary and benefits for all the in house talent who worked on the game and even a portion of the "overhead" expenses of running a business such the rent, liability insurance, management saleries and so on.

[Tobias]

Mad Skills Motocross: $120k

I do pay myself. No revenue share deals.

[Grey Alien]

I would have thought BFG would be using in house talent for all of their assets now?

For the game I'm writing now the programming and art is in-house but sound is outsourced. We even include QA in the budget, and when working out if it's profitable we have to include marketing, customer support, management etc basically everything else that has to be in place to make the game happen as James C. Smith says.

[DigitalDuffman]

My game Nasty (XBLIG), which I just released a week ago, cost $1,500 in art and music assets (the rest I did myself). Spent about 8 months of my spare time working on it... if I actually billed my the time spent, I'm sure it would be near $20,000 for the entire game.

[Bad Sector]

For my last game €4 (non-exclusive music from indiegamemusic), not counting my living expenses because they would be there even if i wasn't making the game :-P.

Did it made that back? Let me check mochiads...

...yeah :-)

[zoombapup]

We spent about 5k on air ace/panzer ace before we killed em. Ive probably spent another 3-4k on various art stuff and concepts. None of which I've used.

[JGOware]

Originally Posted by James C. Smith

It's funny to me that you would post those two points in the same message and not recognize their relationship. Don't you think BFG is doing exactly what Nexic is doing and counting their own people's time as an expense? When I talk about the budgets of the games I work on they include a lot more than the out of pocket expenses we pay contractors. They also include the salary and benefits for all the in house talent who worked on the game and even a portion of the "overhead" expenses of running a business such the rent, liability insurance, management saleries and so on.

Agreed. Thank you.

hmm.. curious though. I've always wondered how a portal would handle in house development costs. Let's say an employee is getting paid 60k a year to do nothing but graphics, if he does 3 games a year is that considered a 20k budget on graphics per game then?

Also, does lowering the costs of games to 6.99 and less, mean media expenses from out sourcing artists (for indie games) is lowering as well?

[MFS]

Originally Posted by JGOware

Agreed. Thank you.

hmm.. curious though. I've always wondered how a portal would handle in house development costs. Let's say an employee is getting paid 60k a year to do nothing but graphics, if he does 3 games a year is that considered a 20k budget on graphics per game then?

Also, does lowering the costs of games to 6.99 and less, mean media expenses from out sourcing artists (for indie games) is lowering as well?

Typically yes, this is the common method used by devs/pubs to calculate costs. Person X costs Y per month per Z months = contribution to the game's cost. Usually these numbers are higher than just salary as well, to include some portion of overhead costs. Say, a $5k a month salary might be considered a $7k billable rateby the company.

[Grey Alien]

Yea we do it like MFS says. There's stuff like employee insurance and tax to take into account etc.

[zoombapup]

Yeah, the average overhead for actually employing someone is pretty bloody staggering. Its what really scares me about actually hiring. Just having to pay for all the various insurances and whatnot.

[James C. Smith]

Originally Posted by JGOware

does lowering the costs of games to 6.99 and less, mean media expenses from out sourcing artists (for indie games) is lowering as well?

Lower sale price could absolutely mean a need to lower development costs.

Low prices could mean more sales and higher revenue. But in the cases where it just means lower revenue the game studio has to make up the difference somehow. Game developers who work for big portals still need their games to be profitable and the fact that it was their own portal that lowered the price doesn't mean they get some kind of break. One way or another every game studio need to try to earn enough revenue to cover all the development, marketing, and support costs of the game. If low sales prices mean lower revenue than the next step is lower development costs with less expensive contracts or whatever it takes.

Of course this is an over simplification. There are a thousand variables. Sometimes the best approach is to raise production costs and shoot for a runaway hit. If you can afford to gamble you could win big. Another approach is to do a better job of market research to try to make better guesses about what kinds of games will sell well. And a large studio isn't going to go under just because one or two games weren't profitable. They would have a large portfolio of different kinds of games with different budgets and different revenue. As long as they all average out to positive then it’s all good.

But in general, if all games overall are generating less revenue than much effort will likely be but into reduce the cost of making games.

PS: When did games sell for more than 6.99 on average? It used to be slightly hider than this on average but don't believe the people who claim that games recently shifted from $19.99 to $6.99. That may be true is some very narrow cases, but on average, games have been selling WELL below $10 for a VERY long time. I have a royalty statement from 2004 showing the sales of a popular breakout game on a popular download portal where they sold thousands of copies at many different price points and the average price was $8.18. This wasn't a special promotion for a particular game. This was business as usual for all games sold on that portal 5 years ago. In the past 5 years the average prices has steadily declined slightly by about 20 cents per year. I think a bigger problem has been a glut of content and extremely high churn rates. When there is a new game a day, and most of them are not complete crap, it is very hard for any one game to generate lots of revenue and pay for a high development cost. So everyone is finding ways to make quality games for less money or finding new places to sell games or finding ways to raise above the noise and make something outstanding.