$150k To Add ONE Character To A Fighting Game?

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At first I thought this was a joke. $150,000 to add one new character to a fighting game that already exists? Damn. No wonder games are so expensive these days. :eek:

  • $48,000: Staff Salaries - 8 people for 10 weeks
  • $30,000: Animation and Clean-up Contracting
  • $4,000: Voice recording
  • $2,000: Hit-box Contracting
  • $5,000: Audio Implementation Contracting
  • $20,000: QA Testing
  • $10,000: 1st Party Certification
  • $10,500: IndieGoGo and Payment Processing Fees
  • $20,500: Manufacturing and Shipping Physical Perks
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People don't realize how expensive software really is to create. Where I work, people making the change requests don't realize that just adding a new text box to an existing website is going to cost the company $1k+. By the time they pay me to code it, qa to test it, the manager to approve it, and the server admins to deploy it, the cost adds up real quick.
 
Development costs are what they are. Game developers are no different, they need to pay salaries else who would work there?

150k doesn't seem overly high to me once you subtract transaction fees, and divide it by the amount of people probably working on this.

The fixed costs alone in running a studio would probably surprise a lot of people also... (which would be already factored into the costs...)
 
It doesn’t cost anything, other than what people are forced to pay.
 
$48,000: Staff Salaries - 8 people for 10 weeks

That's some cheap staff. $15/hour?(Assuming 40 hour/week).
 
So it took 8 people 10 weeks to make one character? And they contract out the animation?

What they hell do the 8 people do for 10 weeks? Drink coffee, come up with ideas about the character, watch some TV, have office olympic games, do a little more work, decide to go out for chinese food, etc. I mean the game apparently is done, they're simply adding another character.

I can see Street Fighter if Ken didn't exist "lets just pallet swap the gi of Ryu, and give him blonde hair, shit we're going to need at least a quarter million to get this done"
 
I have got about 3,000,000 in gold, in Skyrim. I can easily pay 150K.
 
sfsuphysics said:
So it took 8 people 10 weeks to make one character? And they contract out the animation?
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This is not unreasonable. Pre-production concepts with back and forths, modelling, texturing, rigging, testing.. 10 weeks is actually a pretty quick turnaround. Pre-vis/pre-production alone could take a few weeks. Let alone the entire process.
 
The cost of games article.

Shit happened not to long ago I believe it was EA. Its all BS.

No we don't need to pay more for games.

END.
 
...Manufacturing and Shipping? What is this, shipping a disc based DLC?

I'd imagine this isn't always the case, because often when a game is finished, they'll have some characters they intended to put in the game but weren't finished in time. Completing a half finished character would be cheaper, I'd imagine.
 
It makes sense really, seeing as they don't work for the company anymore, and they would like to get paid somehow for their time and effort...although most companies have already got the characters created and ready to go in the case of DLC.
 
sfsuphysics said:
So it took 8 people 10 weeks to make one character? And they contract out the animation?

What they hell do the 8 people do for 10 weeks? Drink coffee, come up with ideas about the character, watch some TV, have office olympic games, do a little more work, decide to go out for chinese food, etc. I mean the game apparently is done, they're simply adding another character.

I can see Street Fighter if Ken didn't exist "lets just pallet swap the gi of Ryu, and give him blonde hair, shit we're going to need at least a quarter million to get this done"
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Fighting game depth and balance is a lot deeper than you realize. Ken and Ryu haven't been just a palette swap since before SF2 CE. After that they've grown more and more apart each year.

You're not just creating a single character, you're balancing that character's dozens of attributes against every other character in the game.
 
Alpert said:
The cost of games article.

Shit happened not to long ago I believe it was EA. Its all BS.

No we don't need to pay more for games.

END.
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And what games have you recently developed and shipped to market to backup your knowledge on cost?
 
demingo said:
And what games have you recently developed and shipped to market to backup your knowledge on cost?
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I don't but what I do.

I don't play competitive games so paying a premium to be first fails for me.

$30 is about maximum I pay for a game. Online sales is my reality.

Sure a market exist were people can be herded to pay large sums of money's.
 
And what is the actual cost when you are developing these "extra" characters along with the core game from the start (to be sold later)?.... which is EXACTLY what Capcom has made standard practice for the last 3+ years.

Also, while the characters aren't necessarily "palette swaps", they do tend to share move sets, animation sets, hit boxes, etc. Which drastically cuts down on time spent on that specific character, much of the work is already done.

And of course that last line rarely is a factor anymore, and looks to have been thrown in to further inflate the joke of a number they are spewing.
People don't realize how expensive software really is to create. Where I work, people making the change requests don't realize that just adding a new text box to an existing website is going to cost the company $1k+. By the time they pay me to code it, qa to test it, the manager to approve it, and the server admins to deploy it, the cost adds up real quick.
Click to expand...

This sounds like a pretty good example of inefficiency / waste thanks to corporate policy...Realistically this is what, an hour total of work?
15 minutes to "code" a text box, 15minutes to test it, sits on managers desk for two weeks, finally gets to server admins who click three buttons to push it out. Yeah totally justified $1k+ expense.

I'm not programmer though, so maybe your text box is really complex... :rolleyes:
 
lilbabycat said:
I'm not programmer though, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.
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Fixed that for ya. :)

Seriously though, people under-estimate the cost of development so much these days. As a programmer myself, I tell people, "It's not as easy as I make it look so bear with me."

While those numbers are questionable, when you use Marvel vs Capcom 3 as an example, the amount of work to introduce a new character is a lot. When you understand how deep the fightiing engine is, it is easy to get overwhelmed at the amount of required tweaking to get the new player to play right. And this is just testing and functionality while you still got the artistic side of it.
 
Ken and Ryu share basic move sets and that's it. They have difference animations, speeds, damages, hit boxes, ranges, angles, recovery times, threshholds, combos, Supers/Ultras, etc.

Their similarities are far more aesthetic than anything technical, and they play totally differently (if you're not just spamming hadoukens in the corner.)

Capcom's pretty bad but it's less in the DLC front and more in just creating games like SFxT and TxSF. Most of the DLC they release are just costume packs. I guess AE is kind of DLC but it was like $15 for 4 new characters and new features.
 
Steve said:
At first I thought this was a joke. $150,000 to add one new character to a fighting game that already exists? Damn. No wonder games are so expensive these days. :eek:
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I call BS!!!!!!!!

It's like the medical industry telling me that it will cost $500,000 for a single kidney transplant, where I know I can go to Mexico and get a set of kidney for a set!!! It's all lies!!!!

/:eek:
 
DAMN you no edit!!!!
mzs_biteme said:
I call BS!!!!!!!!

It's like the medical industry telling me that it will cost $500,000 for a single kidney transplant, where I know I can go to Mexico and get a set of kidneys at $5000 a set!!! It's all lies!!!!

/:eek:
Click to expand...
 
yet M.U.G.E.N have tons of characters all done for free.

The hardest part i think is to balance everything out.
 
ballistic90 said:
...Manufacturing and Shipping? What is this, shipping a disc based DLC?
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The shipping is to ship out the perks (for people who donate) via the indigogo site, as well as the fee above it is for indigogo processing. Basically ~30k just to ask for funds.

Frankly, the cost to make media now-a-days has become so inflated that I'm not surprised to see many developers struggle just to stay open. It's quite sad really.
 
A boxed argument, when the issue's are much larger.

Just for shits and giggles

"Capitalism and public health care. HA ha hahahahahahahaha!"
 
this seems about right. I work in game development as a character artist and the numbers seem accurate.

software is not cheap and neither is the time and skill of a 3d artist responsible for modeling, texturing, rigging etc.
 
So how much and how many do they think they will need to sell to recoup the $150k?
 
lilbabycat said:
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-put-text-boxes-in-an-html5-form.html

ok fellas. justify your existence all you want. Maybe the "text box" example was a bad one, I'm sure you do more complex duties than that.
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Yes, it takes 15 minutes to slap a textbox on a blank white background.

Wait... you want it integrated into your existing layout in an aesthetically pleasing way? Better bring in a layout artist. Oh, and it needs to gracefully degrade down to mobile browsers and has accessibility requirements? Tack on a couple hours of stylesheet work. You want it to work on how many browsers? Need the QA guy to test them all.

Oh, did you want that text box to actually do something? Back-end database integration, server-side scripting, some flavor of data streaming to the client; they all need to be implemented and tested. HIPAA compliance, the financial services industry, or privacy regulations? God help you.
 
XenIneX said:
Yes, it takes 15 minutes to slap a textbox on a blank white background.

Wait... you want it integrated into your existing layout in an aesthetically pleasing way? Better bring in a layout artist. Oh, and it needs to gracefully degrade down to mobile browsers and has accessibility requirements? Tack on a couple hours of stylesheet work. You want it to work on how many browsers? Need the QA guy to test them all.

Oh, did you want that text box to actually do something? Back-end database integration, server-side scripting, some flavor of data streaming to the client; they all need to be implemented and tested. HIPAA compliance, the financial services industry, or privacy regulations? God help you.
Click to expand...

15 minutes to slap a textbox on a black white background :confused:

No wonder...
 
Jaer44 said:
The shipping is to ship out the perks (for people who donate) via the indigogo site, as well as the fee above it is for indigogo processing. Basically ~30k just to ask for funds.

Frankly, the cost to make media now-a-days has become so inflated that I'm not surprised to see many developers struggle just to stay open. It's quite sad really.
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I guess that makes more sense then for that particular part of the quote.
 
Apparently the staff of 8 people are not doing any voice recording, animation, hit-box, audio (that's not voice recording) or QA testing.............. so what would you say they're doing? Seems like a one big double dip here.
 
ZippZopp said:
this seems about right. I work in game development as a character artist and the numbers seem accurate.

software is not cheap and neither is the time and skill of a 3d artist responsible for modeling, texturing, rigging etc.
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This, along with the programming needed and underlying architecture. It sounds about right to me.
 
Wow, the staff salaries really suck. I thought there was more money to be made in the gaming industry, even at the lower staff levels. $31k per year in this example.
 
XenIneX said:
Yes, it takes 15 minutes to slap a textbox on a blank white background.
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I guess I imagined that a large part of this would be automated through software at this point in the industry. For example, I "admin" an Silverlight frontend / SQL backend based database program that (while being limited in functionality), allows me to create custom forms, reports, and menu systems in a relatively short amount of time.

I cannot imagine that the folks at Capcom aren't using extremely mature tools for their work, ones that cut down on these seemingly inflated costs.
 
Before I read this I thought they mean a character as in the letter a. :D

ballistic90 said:
...Manufacturing and Shipping? What is this, shipping a disc based DLC?

I'd imagine this isn't always the case, because often when a game is finished, they'll have some characters they intended to put in the game but weren't finished in time. Completing a half finished character would be cheaper, I'd imagine.
Click to expand...

They might mean stuff like the fee Microsoft charges to push out updates. Something like 40k a patch. :D
 
This is why I don't buy this horseshit unless it's 90% off. You can justify the resource allocation all you want, but my response to this is ether get more efficient or kill the genre.
 
bh192012 said:
Apparently the staff of 8 people are not doing any voice recording, animation, hit-box, audio (that's not voice recording) or QA testing.............. so what would you say they're doing? Seems like a one big double dip here.
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Lead art team spends a few weeks doing concept, character design, and keyframe animation, contracts a Korean or Vietnamese animation house for a month to do the tweening and cleanup. Meanwhile, they implement mechanics and coding, as well as rough balancing. When they get the art assets back, they integrate them into the project.

Sound guy scripts the dialog, does the casting call, then contracts a properly-equipped studio to do the recording. Sound guy also contracts out foley, as well as licensing whatever overly-expensive sound samples they need.

No idea what gets contracted out for hitboxes, but it's obviously not much, since $2000 is chump change.

$20,000 pays for a dozen "professional gamers" to playtest and tweak balance for a couple of weeks so that a bunch of self-entitled whiners don't start screaming "ZOMG new char is OP!"

The rest are fixed costs for the project.


TL;DR: Things are expensive. Coding is hard.
 
Kuraudo said:
This is why I don't buy this horseshit unless it's 90% off. You can justify the resource allocation all you want, but my response to this is ether get more efficient or kill the genre.
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Whenever they mention how much more dev costs are today compared to 10-15 years ago they never bother mentioning that they are also selling many more copies than 10-15yrs ago as well.
 
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