Costs of Starting Modest Game Dev Studio

Games
21

I suppose. I was going by memory of a salary survey that Gamasutra did a couple years back where it placed the average at about $60K for someone with like 3-5 years experience or something, not what experienced coders in large studios in the bay area make. ;) I may be conflating different parts of the survey in my brains though.

If coders are making $100K a year in the games industry, well now we know why games have such fucked up budgets. Or I have a seriously deflated view of what people earn nowadays.

Anyway, cut out one of the four so it’s Joel +3 and you have an indie team of four, which is not unusual. Each can then make $5000 per month, which I know positively is pretty good for indies. I would also wager that there are coders and artists out there would who work from home on indie projects like a start-up studio for lower salaries to get out of the suck of the real industry. Maybe not.

The nice part about this type of arrangement is that the work is self-funding. The publisher gets to eat cock instead of 90% of the take and the devs actually make the income. Setups like this are how certain indie programmers who have some cash in advance (ahem… no names) are able to keep pumping out games that only sell 15K copies. Clearly, the system can work.

22

Looking through that payscale.com site (actually, guessing new URLs), I found:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer_%2F_Developer_%2F_Programmer/Salary

So yeah if games coders make the same as the rest of the industry (I am too fuzzy to recall previous QT3 discussions right now) I guess $70K is about average. Well Joel, it’s you plus two I guess, if you hire dudes who want averages. Or you need more than $5M to start up. ;)

23

You can hire an Indian computer programmer for $8000/year, compared with $70,000/year for an American programmer.

Actually you could pay less.

And you know what: you’d get exactly what you’d pay for. Indian programmers are ok if you want to implement the ten thousandth version of the same old web service package. However the ones who have talent, initiative, etc., are already in the US, getting their PhD’s and landing better jobs. Also, there is essentially NO gaming culture, whatsoever, in India. So you’re going to have to hold their hands through everything. On top of that, it’s anywhere between a 9 and 12 hour time difference if you’re in the US. Did I mention that your basic entry-level Indian programmer has likely never programmed before? Yeah. Crazy.

I have a lot of experience working with Indian out-sourced, programmers. The ones I knew were earnest, friendly, dilligent and worse than useless when it comes to making games.

Really you are looking at paying $50-100k for your regular programmers depending on where and who you are hiring. You can hire college grads for cheap but you’re going to have to pick the few good ones from all the chaff (good luck with that if you aren’t, yourself, an experienced game programmer). Also, those guys are going to get better offers quickly. You can hire known quantities but then you’re paying a lot more. And you do want quality. These are the guys who maku things happen. You can’t settle for anyone who took a C class. In the end, if the programmer isn’t pretty damn smart then they are just as likely to set your project back as to get anything done. If you aren’t a hotshot programmer yourself then you also are going to want to hire one to lead all these crazy yahoos that you just hired. Depending on the scope of the project you may want multiple leads or other specialists (i.e a tools lead, a physics guy, etc.).

Whomever said you pay 1.5 times more for the artists and designers had it backwards (edit: oops, read that wrong, they were saying 3/4ths which is about right). You’re looking at about 2/3rds the salary for artists and even less for designers. There are just a lot more artists out there than programmers and designers are everywhere (half this board probably thinks they should have a job designing games and some of them might even be right).

None of that counts infrastructure. Sure, you can work out of your house. And get nothing done. There’s a reason why people leave their houses and go to work. You ARE going to have to pay for insurance and for an office and for a lot of other little things. You probably want a person just to manage all these programmers, designers and artists (even if you are also doing that) and interface with your clients (if and when you get those). You will need QA at some point (if you ever get close to finishing something). If you have more than 3 QA you will want a QA lead. And an office assistant or two to do well, a billion little things that don’t occur to you now but become incredibly important once you actually have a company going and want to get anything done (who places all the recruitment ads? who answers the phones? who pays the bills? who plans all the trips? who stocks the fridge with caffeine? etc., etc., etc).

The more I’ve learned about actually making games, the more I’ve realized just how little interest I have in ever managing and running any project with more than 3 people. It all sounds great in your head but the reality is that it’s expensive, time-consuming and maddening all at once. And the guy who owns the company, and the producer, more often than not, make the programmers’ crunch time look like nothing.

Final cost though? Are you going to license an engine or two? Are the graphics like Tribes? Or like Gears of War? A good start would be to look at the team size for a game similar to the one you think you want to make. Gears of War had something like 20 programmers working on it according to the credits. I don’t remember how many artists, etc. You probably don’t want all that up front though. You probably want a few of the leads and such on board early to get you the demo to (hopefully) sell to EA (along with your souls) to get the money to hire the rest of the guys.

24

My salary assumptions are probably biased by the fact that I am in CA. Perhaps you can get good programmers for $70k, but not here :)

I hope I didn’t sound too negative in my post, but I think that starting a game developer is one of things that many people idealise, and imagine would be awesome fun. The reality is somewhat different in my experience. Especially for something as large as making a tribes type game multiplayer - eek, now you need to hire network programmers, and good ones were as rare as hen’s teeth last time I looked in that market.

25

Hire this man. :)

26

Introversion games did it for about nothing. They have an interesting blog about it all.

27

While I would so love the opportunity to ruin the Tribes franchise some more, I really don’t have any intentions to do this. I was just curious. Even if I could somehow raise the money, I’d feel irresponsible starting up a game studio with no development experience. I’d want to go work a couple years on a project from start to finish at least once.

If I do anything, it’ll be camping outside Garage Games’ building throwing rocks at them as they enter and exit until they finally capitulate and just make a new non-Tribes-franchise Tribes game. They could talk it TEAM JETPACK.

28

Programmers go for cheaper in Canada. But if you are trying to hire in Montreal or Vancouver, you’ll be competing against a bunch of big names who pay market rates for salaries.

Basically, if you want someone with enough experience to lead a project and see it to completion, you really do need to assume at least 70k, probably higher. Otherwise, you’ll never lure them away from where they are already working.

IMO, the best way to start a company would be to already know a bunch of talent who’d be willing to quit their jobs and work with you based on friendship alone. I already have a few people like that, and one day I hope to make those phonecalls. But today is not that day.

But not all your programmers have to be paid the full amount. You can get new programmers, you just have to be willing to budget the time of your seniors to hold their hands through tasks.

29

I am going to say this with some authority because I have had to deal with a lot of foreign programmers.

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR

Any company that is serous about software development will never use these.

Personally, the only countries I would feel ‘safe’ getting programmers from would be:

USA, Canada, and Japan.

The ones I would feel a little nervous, but still ok with would be:
England and Germany.

The countries I have never seen good code from (with multiple samples from multiple programmers):
India, China, Czech, and a smattering of other eastern block countries.

I am sure there are exceptions, but I have yet to see them.

30

Aren’t game programmer salaries significantly below the average for the discipline, especially on an hourly basis? Everyone’s willing to do it for peanuts.

Looking around, I can find a few things saying the salaries are about the same, but nothing good on the hours.

31

Salaries are lower, and hours are much worse.

32

Like Jason, I would have to think game programmer salaries average much lower than standard business rates for programmers because of the faux glamor attached to the job. (That’s not meant to be insulting, anyone familiar with game programming knows it’s usually far from glamorous.) I would think you could further offset costs by locating your indie startup somewhere where cost of living was lower, like the Midwest.

Establishing in such a market might limit your ability to hire experienced programmers, but if you’re an indie shop only looking for a handful to start with then you don’t need a talent pool as big as places like the Bay Area to begin with. You’d be shocked how much less the average programmer in someplace like Indianapollis makes comapared to his counterpart in San Jose.

33

Damnit. I was just about to post something along these lines.

You also only need about 200 square metres of office space.

Three decent developers
A good modeller (A dime a dozen these days.)
Two good graphics guys
A good project manager who can double as a coder if needed.
A contractor for music and sounds
Seven decent PC’s
Two Decent Servers
Software licences
Insurance
Furniture
Misc. expenses.

Then you’ll need marketing

and…

I don’t know much about US currency and how much this will set you back but I recon you could get away with a million a year. A development cycle of two years per product.

Since it is a modest game sell it for $20. With digital distribution, let’s be pessimistic and say you will see $10.

So for $2 000 000 expense you will have to sell 200 000 copies to break even and pay yourself a decent salary. Remember that a lot of those expenses are once off as well.

If you are not looking to shoot the moon you could make it work.

34

The problem with starting your dev studio in a cheap area is growing. It can be hard to acquire and keep talent when you are in the middle of nowhere.

35

If you get to the part where growth is something that’s of paramount concern aren’t you, by definition, able to afford to move the studio?

36

Selling 200,000 copies is difficult with a full marketing department and a full budget.

37

My first suggestion, get a good solid business manager on board. So many companies fail because they don’t know how to manage themselves. Even success can kill a poorly managed company.

38

Moving a studio to a different city/state is guaranteed to tear the company you’ve built apart though. You might as well close it and start fresh at that point.

39

From my experience (and this is in a fortune 500 engineering company):
Russia was a disaster, Poland is blah, Israel was a mess, Singapore is shockingly good, China is terrible, and India is pretty much like throwing money into a fire.

It is unreal how bad India is. Like it was said above, the talented engineers out of countries like India aren’t sitting around working for 8k when they can make way more.

40

The best and brightest always move to where they can make the most money. Talented engineers from any developing country will relocate to the US for either a Ph.D. program at a university (student visa in the hopes of getting a work visa later and green card) or get hired directly via work visa (far less common). This has been the case with the Indian, Russian, and Chinese graduate students that I’ve met (although some are better than others at English and some have a higher personal drive to succeed than others).