I've never understood why people need shit ton of money to create game

I've never understood why people need shit ton of money to create game

Maybe I'm just dumb but can someone explain why people need like 30k to make a single game

pls respond

Advertising, going after realism in graphics, advertising, celebrity voices, advertising.

The majority is marketing and labour/wages. Obviously unless it's a studio's first game and they have a huge overhead for buying a studio and equipment there's not a lot of physical goods being purchased. It's all very immaterial.

At the very least, you need to pay people to make games. No one's gonna work for free.
Add marketing and other shit on top of that

People need things like food and shelter while a game is being made

Marketing

what if it's just a group of friends making a game? surely you don't need to pay them if you promise to share the profit between everyone

30k, straight up at least a third is going to taxes, so 20k. 4 man team, you got 5000$ for each, that can keep a person good for 6-8 months on the cheap side, should be enough.

That's just living.

I think marketing is just a waste for indies, word of mouth is the only thing that works there and a shitload is needed for any proper marketing. You kinda need a large publisher for that, like EA and No Man's.

Your shitty friends have bills to pay, even if you don't. They can't work full-time on game development just for the promise of a profit share. People require a salary in order to cover expenses for rent and food and Internet and hookers and blow in the meantime.

A just so you know, $30k per year barely constitutes a living wage for a single person. Never mind a team of 5 or 30 or 200, or the fact that properly educated and trained professionals will expect compensation between 50k and 100k per year.

Honestly I'm pretty shocked how you fail to grasp even the most basic principles of economics.

not OP but why do people who use unity and work alone need money? isn't everything in the program free?

To pay your workers, advertising
It is possible.
It is possible to do it for pretty much free though, Cave Story was made by Pixel in 5 years during his spare time

>Your shitty friends have bills to pay, even if you don't
Then there's indies with families, their upkeep is just immediately 30-50% higher because of the little turds

It turns out you have to pay people when they work. Pretty weird, huh?

It is.
That's why shit like Undertale's kickstarter is basically a scam: the nigga's been living in his parents' basement so he didn't really need any "development money" but still asked for 200k and tumblrinas gave it to him.

OP here. I forgot to mention that I was talking about people who work alone or in pairs.

Because there's no fucking way that one or two guys need thousands of money when they're making a game on a free program

How many people does it take to make a video game?
How many years does it take to make a video game?
What is the annual salary of a computer programmer, concept designer, or audio composer?

Multiply the three together, and you have the beginning of your budget range.

Next add in advertising, because even if you make the most awesome game ever, nobody is going to even look at it if it's lost in the sea of Steam releases. Add into that the marketers you pay to do the marketing, and the managers you pay to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Oh, and one last thing. Even after spending 3-5 years with a team of 20 people making the game, it could still end up like shit. That's because there's no guarantee that the plot you've written or the game system you've developed will be any good until it is actually complete. So your options then are: spend even more time redoing the whole thing, likely doubling the projected time and expense, or just release the shit game as-is.

$30k is barely enough to pay ONLY yourself for two years of work. It is not going to pay a team of programmers for any meaningful length of time, and certainly not everyone else you need.

>there's no fucking way that one or two guys need thousands of money when they're making a game on a free program
How much is your yearly cost of living?

quite low, I'm a simple man

>what if it's just a group of friends making a game?
Then it'll probably be pretty shit and nobody will care how much it costs if team members are being chosen based on how good buds they are instead of talent

>I think marketing is just a waste for indies, word of mouth is the only thing that works there
And you honestly think money isnt used to grease the wheels of all that "word of mouth". You have to pay to get a lot of the big Youtubers to play your game

You can give a rough number

maybe then you're simply to stupid to understand it

>And you honestly think money isnt used to grease the wheels of all that "word of mouth". You have to pay to get a lot of the big Youtubers to play your game
And you're not gonna be fielding that level of money for any actual impact unless a publisher is doing it for you

I'd say around 20k-25k

okay, less than 100k is an acceptable number for a studio of few men. I don't understand indie budgets going over that though

I play games, I don't create them so I don't know jackshit about this shit

He mostly used it to commission artists iirc

>quite low, I'm a simple man
I'm willing to bet $12k-$15k, assuming you live in the US and still maintain a car/pay bills. And really, that is on a budget of ramen and just hoping that you don't get a medical/mechanical emergency. Sure, it might be less if you are living with your parents and not paying rent, or if you are lucky enough to live somewhere with good bus support. But $15k is probably close to the minimum that a person in the US should expect to pull in and do reasonably well.

$30k is going to pay the two of you one year. That's assuming you don't mind living like McDonalds employees, after taking out a 4-year college loan, and have no ambition to do any better. For most people, $30k a year is probably what they'd assume would be acceptable for themselves after that college study. And really, that's on the low end.

so you want 5 people. well, thats 5 computers, and some of them will be for modelling and some will be for testing the game, so lets say, 1000 bucks a computer. thats 5 grand, so 1 sixth of the budget. now, lets assume you pay these people literally minimum wage, 7 bucks an hour, and they work, oh, nearly nothing, 5 hours a day. thats 3500 a month.
then you rent a building, and since your a game dev you do that in san francisco, thats about 10 grand for a 5 office building. its been one month and your at 18k for 30 days of work, over 50% of your budget...

~2 years to make a game
~35 people working on it

730 days x 36 wages x Minimum wage x 8 hours

I literally gave an example thats within an indie budget, pay a few grand to make Jesse Cox or whoever the kids watch these days to make funny faces while playing your game.

>You have to pay to get a lot of the big Youtubers to play your game
There are small youtubers with more loyal following who is there really for the game and not to worthship the youtuber.
They dont charge for shit.

actually you can massively cut direct costs on marketing w/o losing efficiency by sending free review copies to as much outlets/letsplayers as you can

>I'd say around 20k-25k
>okay, less than 100k is an acceptable number for a studio of few men
That's a bit more reasonable of a number, although by "few men" I hope you mean three or less. You're still looking at several years for completion, assuming it isn't something incredibly simple you have planned. $100k would probably last a team of two people for two years on that sort of budget, to give you an idea.

>I don't understand indie budgets going over that though
Because they either want the project to be bigger/better or they want to hire more talent onto the team to improve the quality.

And your example is shit, you're not gonna be buying any promotion for pennies, you think Cox is going to jump on your cock because you offered him 500$ and a free copy of a shitty indie game?

Level of education need 'requires' higher pay.
Also american developers need to be able to maintain that youtube channel and blog and the espresso machine and the 2 months vacation.
and the pay for the idea guy and the ceo and 15 other folk that do nothing for the game other than hype it.
Its an industry

You do both m8, you send out review copies and pay for sponsored content. And people are more likely to play your review copy if people know what the fuck your game is

Lots of people have the same idea. You have to do something else to get yourself notice and convince people who get flooded with review copies to open your email

You should start reading what I say. And plenty of Indies do it without a publisher, Guns of Icarus had a ton of sponsored content and tournies

go for the less busy ppl (like,

how much does it cost to get youtubers play your game anyway?

if its memetastic they do it for free.

Most of the popular ones just won't play your game at all, simply because they get too many submissions from all the other indie developers. They want to play the popular or hyped up games, to develop the large fanbase. It's why they have all those subscribers in the first place.

>Undertale kickstarter was a scam
He asked for 5k to pay a few sprite and background artists over the internet. That's it. He ended up with 50k because homestuck fans are retards.

The Undertale kickstarter is probably one of the few videogame kickstarters that wasn't a scam. Have you forgotten 3.3 million?