Game Development: You Need $100,000

In addition to the fully-loaded cost of programmers being substantial, you also have huge budgets for asset creation: art/animation/music/etc. Asset creation is <i>expensive</i>. It also depreciates straight off a cliff: the core audience will see it as novel for a period measured in weeks, days, or even <i>hours</i> in some pathological cases.<p>Many non-game applications have an adoption curve which looks something like the sales graph on BCC (100x now what it was at launch) or the famous YC "gradual adoption, spike, trough of sorrow, plateau, steady growth, traction" narrative. Games almost universally have a big spike at lunch, declining sales through the launch window, and then they fall off a cliff and <i>never recover</i>. The exceptions to this rule are so rare that even non-gamers know their names. My mom remembers Starcraft. You will not be Starcraft.<p>This greatly complicates post-launch marketing, iterating towards a game design which achieves fit with what customers will pay for, etc. (The ability to do that is one reason why social games work so well... that and fixing "our industry has no effing clue how to do customer acquisition" with copious helpings of spam spam spam your friends.)

We run into this a few years ago. We spend around 25k euro (2 guys living in starved artist mode for over a year) and then released because we couldn't risk taking any further credit. We had a working game and it was even some fun - but everyone playing it immediately noticed the parts still missing. And it was pointless, people knew what to expect of that kind of game (a 3d-racer) and so it never had a chance to sell.<p>But there is one more thing - we would have gotten a lot further with a second game. That year was mostly spend on doing the base technology and also learning to do a complete large game on my own (I had done a bunch of trivial games before and worked a few years on big titles with teams in companies - but never did a big title completely on my own before). So not sure if that $100000 rule is still valid for the second title.

I completely disagree with this article. Not too long ago, many in the game industry probably would have said you needed a million to make a game; now, mobile development and indie console development have changed people's perspective. That still doesn't mean that the cost for a studio like Rovio to make a game is the minimum.<p>Making a game for cheap requires realistic expectations and constraints. You're not going to hit every platform, you're not going to have AAA graphics, and you're not going to have 100 levels. That doesn't mean you can't have a compelling experience.<p>You can make a polished, successful game with two people and a couple weeks of work, if those people are experienced and you pick the right platform. Canabalt (<a href="http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/" rel="nofollow">http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/</a>) is an excellent example of this. One developer did the coding, art, and sound. Another developer did the music. The Flash version only took a week to make. When that version was a wild success, a third developer ported it to iOS, which took a couple more weeks.<p>There are numerous examples of this throughout the indie games community. It takes a smart, experienced designer to make a successful game with such reduced scope, but it can be done.

Non game developers consistently underestimate the cost of making a game but not all games cost $100,000. A better metric would be man hours or man months since not all areas of the world garner US/Europe scale wages. Fruit Ninja certainly cost less than Angry Birds and made a healthy profit (allegedly).<p>I agree with the article that the money/time gets you to the point where you can polish the game. Angry birds is not the most innovative game but it's level of polish and crucially it's approachability certainly took half of the budget to create.<p>As an indie it's hard to step back and fund that level of consistency but it needs to be done.

I'm assuming that this article is catered towards ppl intending to be game developers, or ppl wanting to make a game by hiring a bunch of developers.<p>if you count in man-hours, then yes it's into the 100ks.<p>going from the single indie developer perspective,<p>assume you pay yourself $100/hour game takes 4 months to develop total cost is 100$ * 120 days * 10 hours/day = 120,000 $<p>the cost for game assets have not even been included!<p>but no indie developer I know take these costs into account. Who actually cares about sweat dollars? If two-three people sit in room, code+draw for 4 months straight taking ramen noodles, launch and make millions off the game on iOS, they're not going to tell you "We spent $120k of our own money+time". Instead they'll say "We spent 4 months furiously making the game, living off ramen noodles in mom's basement"<p>in summary, the development cost could be either be close to zero, or $100k.<p>if you're hiring a team, yes prepare to splash $100k, but if you go indie, get some good game dev friends, and absorb all costs!

&#62; <i>Some of my clients are surprised when I tell them that the development of Angry Birds cost $140k... because they physically cannot see where the money has gone... They can’t see the dead ends, the prototypes and the endless revisions that got Angry Birds to the point that it became brilliant.</i><p>This is not an Angry Bird specific problem. The exact same thing applies to any polished software that appears simple and intuitive. A good example is Things by Cultured Code and a permanent trickle of complaints in AppStore reviews that an app that simple must not be costing that much. People just fail to realize that simplicity does not come naturally, it's a fruit of a long, laborious and exhausting process.

Just as a reference point, in this article [<a href="http://whatgamesare.com/2011/02/you-need-four-coders-production.html" rel="nofollow">http://whatgamesare.com/2011/02/you-need-four-coders-product...</a>] the argument is made that you need four coders to make a game.<p>I think formula being followed for these articles lends them to being a little...exaggerated. (You NEED X to make a game)<p>I successfully shipped an XBLA game with one other programmer on my team. It took us 14 months, and we delivered on time, in scope, and on budget.<p>We had two designers writing scripts, so I _guess_ you could say we had four coders, but there was a vast gap in programming talent there. I had to go back through near ship and rewrite most of the scripts to fix all the bugs.<p>What you need, is to be smart about how you work (make tools to make making the game easier) and be realistic about what you can accomplish in your given budget/time frame.<p>I'm not saying gamedev is easy, it's hard, and it takes nearly as long to polish the game as it does to get it up and running. But there are so many target markets out there at this point that saying something like you need 100k/4 coders/100 hours of gameplay is foolish.

Braid (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_%28video_game%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_%28video_game%29</a>) is a great example: "During the game's three years of development, Blow put about US$200,000 of his own money into its development, most going towards hiring of David Hellman for artwork and for living expenses."

Game design is really its own beast, I'd say separate (but overlapping) from typical customer development / MVP processes. Making something fun is incredibly hard, let alone marketing, distributing, and profiting from it.

A few years ago I'd make an argument that the indie game market is slowly turning things around in this battle of attrition, but now I'd say they are not only encroaching on the lunacy but helping to fuel it.<p>Don't get me wrong, there will (knock on wood) always be cheaply made gems popping up every year, but it really seems like there are more and more wolves in indie game developer clothing trying to cash in on the robust and evolving indie market--look no further than what Xbox is doing with the Summer of Arcade, those are some very well polished/well oiled professional products (Should Bastion really be considered Indie?), and some even have that indie charm we all love.

Games are a business with a very old model. They are sold the same way movies and music and books have been sold for decades, and the initial release provides instant feedback on the games success.<p>That being said, I wonder if games might be prepped for disruption. A big part of any polished game is user testing. How do we know its fun? We watch people play and see if they have fun.<p>Well, with the advances made in web analytics and the possibilities that graphics acceleration offers in modern (or maybe future) browsers, I could see studios and publishers selling games around a more iterative process.<p>An approach that finds the minimum fun experience and iterates from there could work very well on the web. Games like Asteroids and Missile Command do not need the polish others describe to be engaging, and then hosts of new features can be added over time to make such games more engaging. Add in the fact that web-based business models for games have proven recurring revenue through micro transactions can be very viable, and I think there could be a lean approach to game development.

If development cost is related to size, this 3D shooter game (a technology demonstrator, if you will) is about 100kB: <a href="http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger" rel="nofollow">http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger</a><p>100kB including graphics.<p>Uses procedural texture creation. The group also made available the tool they used for generating those textures.

I've created many games for a total dollar cost of $0. It can be done. Yes it requires using your time, but the opportunity cost is not necessarily in foregoing paid work hours, but rather less time spent watching TV, going to sporting events, going to movies, etc. all of which have their own cost and thus you in a sense save money by not doing them. Not all games have to be huge. Not all games require graphics, or fancy graphics. Or sound. Not all games have to be 3D. It only has to be a game. If you have the right skill set the whole thing can be made by a single passionate, driven person. Minecraft is the recent "mainstream fame" example but was not the first and likely not the last.

Great post, I think the biggest problem with developing games is that it's very easy to have an idea and say "this would be a great game!", but very hard to actually execute. Many people get started only to see the long climb ahead and stop.

I imagine if you're the programmer-designer and hire recent university grads, current students, or young people in underdeveloped countries for the assets, you could get away with a lot less than $100,000.

At least this phrase is not true: "Most Facebook games of note cost at least $200k to get off the ground and many of the more famous ones cost $1m"<p>Some very popular (not the most popular) facebook games started with $0 budget yet have millions of users.