Costs of XBLA development rising?

[carocat]

The costs to produce an XBLA game appear to be rising:

President of GarageGames, Jeff Tunnell, has revealed the costs associated with creating original IP for Xbox Live Arcade are rising due to the "industry standard arms race".

Writing on his blog, Tunnell pointed out that what has previously been considered a high-end figure for development of games for the digital service, is soon likely to be considered the budget of a cheap product.

"Creating an Xbox Live Arcade game is taking most studios 6-12 months. Costs are currently ranging from USD $100,000 to USD $300,000," revealed Tunnell.

"The industry standard arms race will quickly make the top end $300,000 budget a cheap product."

"Right now, I wouldn't consider attempting to make an XBLA game with a USD $100,000 budget. Development kits and Certification would eat up half of that, not leaving much for the actual game development," he said.

However high these costs might seem to independent developers, Tunnell also put them into perspective alongside development of a boxed title for retail.

"While these budgets may seem high to indies, these budgets wouldn't buy coffee on a triple-A console title for the retail box channel," he said.
Source (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=19821)

Personally I would've never thought that it costs THAT much to produce an Arcade title. I mean, looking at the credits of say UNO or Poker, there aren't that many ppl credited. Could this also mean an increase in purchase costs?

Thoughts?

[phatmuther]

surely i would have thought the price will go down now, what with the XNA

[damien©]

surely i would have thought the price will go down now, what with the XNA

same here..... :s

[MisterMalaka]

That's bullpoop.

How many of you think it took them anywhere near 100,000 dollars to make Galaga?

[Blaze Lord]

I do. Read the article.

Since I know you won't, since most posters on this site don't, (and that's something you'll come to learn after posting news for a while, 'cat) I'll quote you the relevant things.

"an XBLA game with a $100,000 budget. Development kits and Certification (QA testing) would eat up half of that." $50,000 just for an dev kit and the cert process. Leaving them $50,000 to port a 20+ year old game, redo some of the graphics, etc. etc. And since you've never programmed anything close to a full game in your life, you'll just have to take my word on it that it's completely reasonable.

[Fleeboi]

So how much would it cost people using XNA to publish their game etc?

[damien©]

So how much would it cost people using XNA to publish their game etc?

It's it just a simple Yearly subsciption fee, Can't think of the price but I don't think it's too expensive anyway.

[MisterMalaka]

I do. Read the article.

Since I know you won't, since most posters on this site don't, (and that's something you'll come to learn after posting news for a while, 'cat) I'll quote you the relevant things.

"an XBLA game with a $100,000 budget. Development kits and Certification (QA testing) would eat up half of that." $50,000 just for an dev kit and the cert process. Leaving them $50,000 to port a 20+ year old game, redo some of the graphics, etc. etc. And since you've never programmed anything close to a full game in your life, you'll just have to take my word on it that it's completely reasonable.
Except for the fact that unless you're an indie developer you've already got a dev kit, so its not fair to include that in the budget of every single game. Then, take in the fact that Galaga doesn't even have updated ANYTHING, other than menus (holy that's where the hundred thou went!) and online play. Such a daunting task to port a few-decade-old coin-op game to the most powerful console currently on the market.

Prices are purposely inflated. Something suddenly sounds more intriguing when its more expensive.

[Blaze Lord]

Konami doesn't roll with just one dev kit. Seems perfectly reasonable that they have at least one for each concurring project they have going. Even if you're right, and Konami didn't get a new dev kit, there's still $20-30k just on MS' testing process.

The menu and other artwork, even without doing any of the sprites in the game, would still run you a couple grand.

So let's say instead of $50k left over for the programming, we're up to $70k. And let's say we used my original estimate of saying all they needed was the 50, except subtracting redoing any sprites with more color depth. So now Galaga (as you pointed out, the barest port yet out) is in the $60-80,000 range, instead of the $100,000.

So what price was inflated, the 400 points (which is the floor price for Arcade titles) the game costs, of which as the article says MS will take up to 70%?

[phatmuther]

if it costs them $100,000, even $60,000 to port over galaga they are doing something way wrong, it should not cost anything near that. Dont give me all this crap about not knowing jack about programming either, Blaze, ive had enough of the "im better than you-ness" spouting out from your mouth these days, if we're all neanderthals, like you seem to have said in every post recently, why not bugger off and find somewhere else to make you feel better about yourself.

[MisterMalaka]

if it costs them $100,000, even $60,000 to port over galaga they are doing something way wrong, it should not cost anything near that. Dont give me all this crap about not knowing jack about programming either, Blaze, ive had enough of the "im better than you-ness" spouting out from your mouth these days, if we're all neanderthals, like you seem to have said in every post recently, why not bugger off and find somewhere else to make you feel better about yourself.

Well facking said.

I understand the price of testing and such, but I personally don't consider that a part of developing the actual game. The title leads one to believe that it costs them that much money just to make the game. Of course there's all those bells and whistles tacked on, but in the end, who gives a fack when we know they'll make it all back plus much more.

[Blaze Lord]

It simply does cost that much, and if you don't consider testing a cost of game development, I can't help that. If you can't put a game onto the Arcade without going through the certification process, it simply is part of the cost of doing business, and it's an expense they have to recoup. If you think a mere $60k is "way too much," then your frame of reference is just drastically out of wack, and you are in dire need of a reality check. Sorry if you're insulted by my trying to deliver that.

The simple truth is that putting Galaga on the Marketplace wasn't a matter of finding an old copy of the game, letting one guy run it through a new compiler, and then slapping together some menus with Photoshop in a matter of minutes. It simply doesn't work like that, guys.

[Kalou]

I don't get how it costs $20k to test a game, but since you know EVERYTHING about gaming, care to explain this? how does making a menu cost a couple of grand? do they hire the best graphics desinger on the planet at $500 an hour?

[Blaze Lord]

$20k is probably what Microsoft charges. For a full retail game, it's probably in the nature of $50k. That's their own certification testing, not including the internal testing that I'm sure Konami must've done. Say, 10 or so testers getting minimum wage, or slightly more than minimum wage, for around 20 hours each. That's being conservative.

As for the menus, yeah, one design they can probably do with just a couple hundred bucks on the cheap. But, presumably they wouldn't cheap out, since they are Konami, and as has already been pointed out, they're expected to recoup almost everything. So, let's say they're willing to shell out say around $500 bucks for a design. But they're a big company, and they want to have choices. So, I'm guessing, they hire a number of artists, each submitting their own design. Now we're at, say, twelve or fourteen hundred? Each submission gives them a couple hundred, and maybe another couple hundred for being accepted. Presumably an accepted graphics layout doesn't get the full clear, and there's feedback from at least one rung of the corporate ladder, if not every rung. So now the artist goes back and redoes stuff, changing things here or there. He isn't a low-level freelancer picked up in the yellow pages, and Konami isn't just a flash in the pan website about, I dunno, outdoor kayaking, so there's an extra fifty bucks, at least, more reasonably a hundred. Pushing us to $1500-$2000. Since I was trying to make a point, I went for the higher end of that estimate.

It gets even more likely to push us to two grand if we go for another reasonable and acceptable idea, that they aren't choosing bids from a number of freelance Galaga-loving designers. Rather, they have a staff of 5-10 in house artists that always work for them. If they work for even half a week we're already at a grand, yeah? In fact, I would argue that this idea is even more likely, so even if an artist is done for the day, he isn't gonna punch out, he's gonna sit at his desk and mess around with small side projects. That's still salary Konami has to spend.

This isn't about knowing 'EVERYTHING' about gaming, it's simply about having some idea about how every business works from simply taking a few economics and entrepreneurship classes, and just extending that through some reasonable conjecture.

As opposed to just seeing a six figure number and a mildly crappy port and assuming there's a conspiracy somewhere. It's more about pork than evil intentions.

[MisterMalaka]

But, presumably they wouldn't cheap out, since they are Konami
So that right there means that they don't HAVE to spend a budget of 300k to make an arcade game.

The article is intimidating.

[Blaze Lord]

Actually, that right there means they're willing to pay an extra grand or two to have spiffy looking UI. Will an original, non-retro Arcade game cost multiples and multiples of Galaga, no matter how many corners you and phat want them to cut? Absolutely.

And I dunno how you get intimidating out of this. Who's being intimidated?

[MisterMalaka]

In that it makes you think that you can't make an arcade game without spending 300k.

[Blaze Lord]

No, the article says $100,000. Which, since you've already conceded an indie developer wouldn't already have an SKU, $50k is already chewed up in the kit and the cert process. In other words, just thinking about getting an Arcade game to market is $50k.

What the article then says is that eventually, there will be upward pressure to make those costs shoot up. Which makes sense. After enough Small Arms and RoboBlitz and all the other original games, even something like Marble Blast seems ho-hum and a game of yesteryear. Which means that most people won't buy those ho-hum games, if you can get an Arcade game running Unreal 3. So it makes perfect sense to think that eventually $300k will be the norm, or even the floor budget.

Fortunately, the article also says that the user base will expand, meaning the upward move of development costs might not necessarily mean an upward move in price for the end user.