The cost of making an indie game
Canadian gaming blog Above 49 has a post on the unexpected expense of designing an indie game, and the importance of people supporting indie games:
It’s also god damn hard to make a game, even as an indie, for less than a million dollars. Another person here, another few months there and a budget can easily hit seven figures. Most people seem unaware of just how expensive even seemingly small independent games are. Frictional’s post mentions a conversation with a friend outside the industry who guessed their budget might be $25,000. I imagine even many serious gamers wouldn’t be much more accurate. Even an order of magnitude increase to that guess is less than half the actual budget.
Read the rest here.
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That was a great little rant. One thing I’d really like to see is a breakdown of how much of the cost was to produce media/assets (e.g. music, textures, storyline, etc) rather than code. I’m new to the industry so I dunno if I’m butchering terminology here — if I am, I apologize 🙂
@Debo: With AAA games the vast majority of the cost of development is assets. The exact breakdown really varies by title, but generally the bigger the game, the bigger the percentage of development money spent on content.
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