I'm looking into putting a team together(my own studio) to create a fps like nova in terms of quality. I'm new to the game world so how much do you think it would cost?
Hey, The answer is: a lot of your money and time You should really consider about doing this, cause gameloft is large company with huge amount of resources and experience, so they can afford it, and you are new to this. I suggest you to start with smaller projects. That's my two cents...
Depending on how hard-core experienced and productive your team is (so you can save on the head-count), expect a project like that to cost anything from close to a million to multiple millions of dollars. Where your team is located is also a factor, it's certainly cheaper to operate in a country where the average wage is lower, but you will then run into a higher risk of quality concerns. You can always read through the credits list of Nova, estimate which people were needed full-time through the majority of the project (leads, engineers, artists) and who are part-timers or subcontractors (marketing, QA etc.) and multiply those numbers by an average wage plus fixed expenses. Expect the project to last at least a year, probably closer to two.
Thanks for the replies. Yeah i know to start small, but the dream is to make the AAA game. A milli? thats crazy. I only have 100,000 Like I said I don't know the game world that well, but how can it cost that much money to make a little ios game? Those designers must be making bank. My team would only be about 10 people.
Coding, level designs, mapping, modeling, rigging, texturing, animating, making effects, scripting, sounds, music << that's a lot of hard work, and if you want quality that's mean you should have more money. Game like N.O.V.A is not a little ios game as you may thought With that amount of money you can create several smaller projects with solid earnings.
$100,000 / 10 = $10,000. That's only 1 month wage in many big cities. Gameloft also probably developed technology that can be shared across many of their current and future games thus amortizing their cost.
Maybe try to work with an smaller team? Hiring some freelancer who do more than 1 thing. Example: I do 2D(sprites, textures, gui...), 3D(hi-poly renderings, low-poly ingame, texturing, rigging, animation) and music. And I'm not the only one. Most freelancer have to be diverse to survive. So my advice: start making an small game with 2-3 freelancers. That will give you lots of experience and if you're making an good game, more funding for your larger projects.
Very few studios who develop AAA titles do so with their own funding. That 100k you have may be enough to develop a demo that you then pitch to publishers or investors in order to secure the full project funding.
First, when you say that you are new to the game world, do you mean that you have never made a game before? At all? And you want to begin with a project like Nova from Gameloft? Now, I'm all for big dreams but you should probably slow down a little. A game with the scope of something like Nova is a huge undertaking. Even for a large experienced team. If you are indeed planning on creating a game, do you have the initial game design ready or just vauge ideas thrown together? Do you have an actual game to develop? It seems to me, that the cost of the project is the least of your problems right now. I hope that I don't come across as hard on you, I just hate to see unrealistic expectations and dreams stray talented people from a healthy path.
In the end it not matters if you have spent 10k, 100k or 1m into the making - the peaople have to like your game and (better "and/or")the marketing needs to be top notch. I do not want to offend the creator of this thread, but his questions sounds to me very naive. AppStore success is a science and any developer with basic experience (in the development process at all) would not ask this questions...but maybe I'm wrong. My advise is: do not put your whole money into the development of a single app at first, start small...put some $$$$ into a nice, polished casual game, learn how the appstore works and then go for the next (bigger) project.
Considering the TC seems amazed at how much NOVA cost to make idt hes qualified to spend 100k on a game...
If you want a good example of a budget FPS, see Infinity Project: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-infinity-project/id344783567?mt=8 I hang out on the same forum as this guy. He probably used +-$700 to make it (Unity3D, dev license, 3D software etc.) and yet he has many thousands of sales. The moral of the story? Start small and clever, not big and easily shaken. It is better to fall from $500 than $100,000. Only if you have explicit knowledge of how to start up a big company should you attempt such a feat. FPS's are time consuming, but if you have the passion, you'll get there
That $700 budget does not count the labor for any programming, artwork, music, UI design, etc. The only way they can claim a budget like that is because they value their time at *zero dollars per hour*... Since the original poster has cash, but no skills or experience in the industry of any kind, he has to hire people for everything from game design, art, music, sound effects, programming, marketing, you name it. None of these people will work for free. None of the good ones will work for cheap. For reference- I do all my own designs, all the programming, some of the artwork, and most of the marketing for myself and will probably still have trouble staying within my roughly $20K budget for Spirit Hunter Mineko (note that I am valuing my time at *zero dollars per hour* to fit this budget too!)... If I had to pay people for the months of my own time at my current consulting rate I'd probably be able to blow a $100,000 budget Realistically, even a $20K budget should be considered very risky in this environment. 95% of the stuff in the App Store sells 0-2 units a day. I'm only doing this because I believe in my design, and *I* want to play it. Same reason I made Rogue Touch. If Spirit Hunter Mineko doesn't make back the investment, I will still be happy to have had the experience of making a high quality game virtually by myself (Mineko will be roughly Nintendo DS caliber, and much like the SNES RPGs of days gone by)... Most importantly I will enjoy playing it! No offense, but if you bring nothing to the table but cash investment and the desire to create a studio and make money, you're better off investing in the stock market. Even in a bad economy. On the flip side, If you bring much more than that and are deadly serious about this and can afford to lose the money if your project fails... lay out your ideas here and see if anyone is willing to work for you! Finally to answer the original question of the thread: I'd expect NOVA probably cost under $1 million, but at least $300K to $500K to make. Remember that Gameloft has a lot of offshore help at cheaper rates.
there's another thread on this board where it took 12 people 3 months to make a chicken sorting game. That should give you an idea how much effort is involved.
This is exactly right. Opportunity cost really needs to be factored into the total cost of developing a game. If it's not a dollar amount (i.e. sweat equity) then at least count the number of man-hours of work that went into it. But would you continue making games as a hobby? That would make it a rather expensive hobby In any case, I hope Spirit Hunter Mineko does well enough to allow you to spend less time consulting and more time making games
Agreed. You should factor in the value of your time multiplied by the amount per hour you could have been paid to do something else other than making the game. Even if you're unemployed or a student. That gives the true cost of development, and may surprise a lot of people. The "budget" for Rogue Touch was under $500 cash, but if you factor in all the time I spent on it at my consulting rates it would've cost well over $10K. Fortunately I did not need to pay myself Would I continue making games as a hobby (if Spirit Hunter Mineko is a failure)? I think the answer is yes, but I would be more cautious in my designs and plans, attempt to build some things smaller in scope for a while. You're right, it *is* an expensive hobby in my case. But people do lots of expensive things with their spare time- dirt bikes, snowmobiles, boating, collecting rare items (coins, stamps, antiques)... At least I'll have something cool to show for my hobby when I'm done, and maybe entertain quite a few other people in the process Would I like to hang up the consulting cape and create games full time? Hell yeah! I've been consulting to some big businesses for 12+ years, and while it's nice being your own boss, I feel like its time for change. Hopefully I do OK with Mineko, because there are a lot of other neat ideas I have written up... just need the time and freedom to get started on them all Final thoughts- I think most of the people who really succeed in the App Store do so because they made a game that *they* personally enjoy playing, and they enjoy making games enough to not worry about the payback. If you're a small fish trying to create something based on committee or a set of bullet points that you think are "hot" right now in hopes of making the big bucks, you'll probably fail. The only ones who can get away with that are the big guys like EA and Gameloft.
