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OffTopic > Handheld Game Budjets

#67473 - sgeos - Wed Jan 18, 2006 9:47 am

Last time I checked, and this was a few years ago, the standard game took 'two years and two million' to complete. That basically puts every year of development at about one million dollars.

Game budgets have gone up. If the time to complete them has gone up proportionally then the above ratio would still hold.

What I'd like to know is, does the average handheld game still adhere to the above ratio? Does the average handheld game cost about a million for every year of development?

I'm also interested in the average team size. From what I can gather it is about ten people.

I don't care about exact figures. Plus/minus 25 percent is close enough for me.

-Brendan

#67493 - ScottLininger - Wed Jan 18, 2006 4:51 pm

Some of the GBA games I own have a team of 4 people, and some of them have a team of 20 people. I always look at the credits because I'm interested in that sort of thing.

What would be cool would be for folks to post the team sizes (according to the credits screen) of games they own. I don't have any of my games with me, or I'd post a few myself. Then we could build our own averages.

I'd be really interested to see if certain kinds of games have noticably smaller teams. A port of an old game, for example, shouldn't take as many people, but the credits might show the original developers, so you'd have to be careful about how you count. A big RPG would likely have a much larger team.

The number of developers is by far the largest cost in software projects.

-Scott

#67795 - Mucca - Fri Jan 20, 2006 11:35 am

Our last project for gameboy was three and a half months, with five to six people, all sound and some graphic work was outsourced. Our current project is five and a half months, with four people, again all sound some graphics outsourced, and maybe some programming will be done on a short term contract depending on how we're fixed later on.
Our budgets are small to say the least, low six figure sums. Of course we cant hope to make something like Lego Star Wars or Zelda with those kind of resources, but a practiced team working close together can achieve a lot.
Ive seen games with even smaller teams, I know one a least that had only one programmer, poor fella.

#67866 - Miked0801 - Fri Jan 20, 2006 11:25 pm

You'd be suprised on what kind of budget Lego Star Wars was done on. Can't say much more than that :)