Well, $4 million would be more money than Stardock has spent developing all of its Windows games – The Corporate Machine, Galactic Civilizations, The Political Machine, and Galactic Civilizations II.
I think you could get started for a fraction of that. Get a few like minded friends together and start working on something. If it seems promising, each of you save up what you’d need to work on it for say 18 months and get it far enough to show a publisher a beta.
The developing budget – the entire development budget – for the first Galactic Civilizations was like $400k.
They’re not. Every year Game Developer magazine does a salary survey of game developer and Software Development magazine does a salary survey of software developers in general. As I recall, the gap is usually just two or three thousand dollars–say 3-5%.
Dave’s right that the hours are much longer, though.
Are the salaries adjusted for qualifications, though, or just averaged over the whole industry? Non-game programming jobs include lots of database and web monkey jobs with way lower qualifications than you’d need to work on a game.
That’s for programmers involved in application development. It’s broken down by area and experience, much like the Game Developer salary survey. (Googling… googling… ) Ah! Here’s a link to the appropriate page from the 2005 survey. I’m not sure if they’re doing it anymore now that Software Development has folded/been merged into Dr. Dobbs’ Journal. And here’s a link to Game Developer’s 2006 salary survey for comparison.
Well, I would hope that from my initial post it would have been clear that “just go to India” was a somewhat facetious suggestion, and I have to admit that I don’t have the experience (or skills) to know anything about which countries have a good or bad programming culture.
So I’m not going to argue the point at all. ;)
But, I do feel compelled to mention that quite a few of the games that I’ve really enjoyed playing have been created outside the “big three” that you mention. Perhaps they’re the product of game types that require less skillful coding, or they’re the product of the exceptions that you mention the possibility of. Regardless, I just want to mention them because as a fan I like promoting them. :)
So: Linley Henzell’s Dungeon Crawl is, imo, the best of the roguelike games, and comes, at least initially, from Australia. (Also from Linley Henzell come Overgod and Lacewing, two very engaging arena-shooters with interesting powerup schemes.) My second favourite roguelike (and therefore, my second favourite computer game) is ADOM, and comes from Germany. Honourable mention to The Unreal World, which is Finnish. (Although, somewhat ironically, not really finished.) (Also from Finland come a whole bunch of caveflyers, which aren’t very exciting on your own but can be tremendous fun with another player in hotseat mode). Lately I’ve played quite a bit of Mount & Blade, which is also unfinished, but a lot more fun to play than many completed games, and is from Turkey. And though I don’t play it any more, I did at one point spent absurd amounts of time on Elite and its successors, which are of course British.
Still, as I said, I’m not arguing the point, particularly given that the huge bulk of all the games I’ve ever played (good and bad) have come out of the US or Japan. :)
Check out some of the blog entries at Introversion Software (Darwinia, DEFCON, etc.) - some interesting stuff as far as business and small-time software operations go (http://www.introversion.co.uk/blog/), with 10 total employees (according to the website). It wasn’t all peaches for them and it reads like a crazy rollercoaster ride (from writing the check for the last bit of funds in the company for the DEFCON launch to having enough money to run for 12 months after the launch).
Erm, it sounds like you are working with outsourced programmers, which will always suck more than usual, that’s in the nature of their employ.
But as to the relative qualities of programmers, I suspect that it pretty much scales with how much you have to pay them, not the countries they come from.
(And an Australian coder could kick any of those coder’s arse any day of the week… :) )
But as to the relative qualities of programmers, I suspect that it pretty much scales with how much you have to pay them, not the countries they come from.
Basically yes although it’s a bit more complicated than that. For example, as I said, there is essentially no gaming culture whatsoever in India. So even if you throw a lot of money at talented Indian programmers I just don’t think you’ll find many, if any, that have an interest and aptitude for game development.
Generally I think you can find good programmers from most or all of the European countries, Australia, Japan, etc. It’s just still a matter of paying for what you get. I worked with some really smart Slovakian programmers workign in Prague for a project. They weren’t amazing but they were adequate. They just cost didn’t cost that much less than it would take to get equivalent American programmers and the management overhead for working with someone 6-9 time zones cost more than the difference.
You can find some “ok” cheap programmers in China. I just think that, again, you’ll find that the overall management overhead for dealing with someone that many time zones away, with poor english skills, will eat up the savings.
That’s for programmers involved in application development. It’s broken down by area and experience, much like the Game Developer salary survey.
Maybe. My personal experience has not been that. Recently I switched jobs and the gaming job I took paid about 20% less than the best non-gaming option I found (although the stock options were better). Furthermore, the gaming companies I talked to were very selective. For example, at the company I now work at I had to take 2 hours of written tests, a 3 hours programming test and at each of my 5 interviews I had an oral exam of some sorts. For a non-gaming job that I was offered they basically looked at my resume and said “ok, you’ll work”. In general the requirements for “application development” in gaming tend to be far higher. In non-gaming it’s usually just a matter of whether you have a certain number of years experience with a given technology (which I think is a bullshit metric, but whatever) whereas in gaming they are far more concerned with whether you are smart enough and figure that if you are then learning the technology won’t be a big deal.
Thinking about the pay for gaming versus non-gaming I’ve decided the following:
From a game programmer’s perspective, yes, the pay is better for non-gaming jobs. And not 3-5% but 10%+. The reason this doesn’t show up in the data cited is because it is considering a game programmer with N years of experience to be roughly equivalent to a non-game programmer with N years experience. In fact, the game programmer is, on average more talented and more likely to earn an above-average salary as a non-game programmer. If, for example, the average qualified game programmer is able to earn 10% above average with a non-gaming job, the actual pay difference is ~13-15%. For the programmer.
However, from the perspective of a game company, the pay is still roughly the same. It’s just that you are expecting more, and getting more, from the game programmers you hire, in terms of overall talent/ability and other things that aren’t easily quantified and put into such a salary survey.
It’s one of those things that is only true “on average”. There are certainly some stupid game programmers and lots of very smart and talented non-game programmers and if I do games you don’t, that doesn’t make me automatically smarter than you. However, on average the demands for grame programming are higher and more is expected for the same experience bracket. Try to get a game job and a non-game job and I think that will be obvious. For game jobs I’ve had to take IQ tests, programming tests, solve logic problems, etc. and it was always clear that there was a lot of competition for the spot. Non-game job interviews have always been a run down of my resume and whether I can sell myself well. And then I’ve received more and better offers from the non-game companies.
They aren’t the only ones. This is what I do too, and have been doing it for ages in spare-time, and for over a year full time. Seems pretty good going so far, making more doing this than I did at my last “triple A studio” job.
Just because you can get a coder for $8k a year doesn’t mean that coder is any good. I reckon it takes around 6 years experience of coding games before you really are hitting the top of the productivity curve, and normally 5 or 6 complete projects.
I’m always amused to see ‘engine programmers’ with 2 years experience and 1 shipped game.
Some games staff genuinely are worth 5 times as much as others in salary. At least.
The best way to estimate costs is probably by heads times project time. “Loaded head count” is what you get when you divide total annual operating cost (salaries + rent + HVAC + annual capital purchases + insurance + whatever) by number of people. Based on the kind of project you want to have, you can determine the staff requirements and what loaded head count to expect by just asking some experienced producer.
So let’s say you’re making a console game with 5 artists, 5 engineers, and 5 designers, plus 5 more support staff of various kinds - IT, HR, etc. Rather shoestring, but what the heck. No doubt the publisher will be doing all the QA and marketing and you’ll get horribly screwed by them, but at least this way the entry cost is fairly low. I don’t really know the right LHC numbers, but IMO there’s no way the loaded head-count is going to be less than $100K, probably it’s more like $150K, but maybe you hire your friends and hand out mythical imaginary options for your future buyout instead of decent salaries, so let’s just say $100K. Say you estimate the project will take 1 year. Sp the cost is 20 x 100K x 1 = $2M. Now double it because you’ve never done this before and all your cost estimates will turn out to be wrong. 9 months into the project is not a good time to be canvassing distant family members and college friends you haven’t talked to in years begging for money.
So how many units do you have to ship if you in effect get $5 per unit to recoup your $4M? This is why studios fold all the time.
Of course if you decide to make a casual flash game and you need just a designer/developer and an artist and 6 months, then maybe it’s just $100K total or even less…
But anyhow, before you start you’d better have a firm handle on staff requirements and project length so you can figure out how much money you’ll need to get from publication or distribution agreements to survive.
I’m surprised in this day of age of XBLA, the casual games market and steam, that anyone would assume that a new studio would have any need for a publisher in the conventional sense. I thought the dark days of some big publisher funding game development then taking all the cash were heading for extinction?
You’d be surprised how little programmers get paid in Japan…which helps to explain how a Japanese developer can have so many people working on a game yet still make money.
I would hope this was meant facetiously; otherwise I would rather question your “authority” on foreign programmers.
The CS educations in most developed countries are at least on par with (if not better) than that of the US, and produce lots of excellent programmers. Sure - there is a tendency for the best talent from countries with lower living standards (Eastern Europe, China, India, et al.), to run off to the USA, but a majority of the best Western European talent (and Indian as well, incidentally) stay right at home where the standard of living is comparable (or better) to the US and the culture suits them better. There are many things more important than earning a little bit more money.
There is the reason why Google, for instance, has an Engineering Centre in Zurich, and recently opened up a new office in chilly Trondheim (awful place to live - but NTNU is a breeding ground for some of the best search-engine engineers today). Or, for instance, why every major international computer company has an office in Bangalore
Even within game development, there are tons of talented game development studios outside of USA/Canada/Japan. One should hardly need to mention the UK-based groups of Creative Assembly, Rockstar, Bitmap Brothers, Psygnosis, etc., but there are many more outside the UK. Ever heard of IO Interactive (Denmark) - Hitman? Paradox (Sweden) - Europa Universalis? Croteam (Croatia) - Serious Sam? Bohemia Interactive (Czech Republic) - Operation Flashpoint? Pinkfloor Interactive (Denmark) - PowerBabes? Digital Illusions CE (Sweden) - Battlefield series? Funcom (Norway) - The Longest Journey? Remedy Entertainment (Finland) - Max Payne?
I would hope this was meant facetiously; otherwise I would rather question your “authority” on foreign programmers.
The CS educations in most developed countries are at least on par with (if not better) than that of the US, and produce lots of excellent programmers. Sure - there is a tendency for the best talent from countries with lower living standards (Eastern Europe, China, India, et al.), to run off to the USA, but a majority of the best Western European talent stay right at home where the standard of living is comparable (or better) to the US and the culture suits them better. There are many things more important than earning a little bit more money.
There is the reason why Google, for instance, has an Engineering Centre in Zurich, and recently opened up a new office in chilly Trondheim (awful place to live - but NTNU is a breeding ground for some of the best search-engine engineers today). Or, for instance, why every major international computer company has an office in Bangalore
Even within game development, there are tons of talented game development studios outside of USA/Canada/Japan. One should hardly need to mention the UK-based groups of Creative Assembly, Rockstar, Bitmap Brothers, Psygnosis, etc., but there are many more outside the UK. Ever heard of IO Interactive (Denmark) - Hitman? Paradox (Sweden) - Europa Universalis? Croteam (Croatia) - Serious Sam? Bohemia Interactive (Czech Republic) - Operation Flashpoint? Pinkfloor Interactive (Denmark) - PowerBabes? Digital Illusions CE (Sweden) - Battlefield series? Funcom (Norway) - The Longest Journey? Remedy Entertainment (Finland) - Max Payne?
