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Luckily, I happen to have that issue of GameInformer right in front of me. The game was Rainbow Six Vegas. Budget breakdown:
30% - Programming
20% - Art
15% - Design
10% - Marketing
8% - Testing
7% - Sound
7% - Animation
2% - Management
1% - Other
They also give a breakdown of 11 months concepting, 8 months preproduction, 10 months production, 3 months submission & release.
It should be noted that some of these numbers are specific to this franchise. 10% marketing is pretty small actually (at least up to a few years ago, publishers routinely spent equal amounts on development and marketing), but in this case it's probably smaller because it's part of an already well-known hardcore franchise, so they don't have to waste money reaching out to people who have never heard of the Rainbow Six games.
Converting lines of code to lines of written text is a dangerous game; actually I think that the vast majority of code lines are much shorter than a full line of text (consider a simple for loop in C++ which might only contain 20 characters; or the one-character open-brace on the following line. Some editors just count lines even if they're comments or blank whitespace. I think it's far more common to see a short line of code than a long line. (But your point about programming taking much longer than prose writing is absolutely correct.)
When I explain to my classes that games are huge, I do it by budgeting:
* Let's say a typical AAA game on a current-gen console costs $10M to develop (this is expensive but by no means the highest; Sims 2 was something like $50M).
* Let's further say that 75% of the dev cost is payroll, and the rest goes to "operations" (i.e. office supplies, rent, hardware, administration personnel, etc.). That's $7.5M just for paid professional developers.
* A few years ago, you could count on developers making an average of about $50K/year (obviously seniors make more and juniors less). Nowadays with inflation it's probably a little more than that, but let's use that number anyway.
* A little math shows that the game then "costs" 150 person-years to develop. That's working full-time, 40+ hours a week, mind you.
Now, let's figure out how long it would take a student team to do the same work. A typical class might demand 10 hours a week from each student, which increases the time to 600 years. Also, productivity studies show that there's about a 4x difference between senior-level and junior-level programmers, so now we're up to 2400 years. An academic year is only 9 months, so that converts to 3200 academic-years, or 6400 semesters.
If my students want to make the next World of Warcraft in a single semester, I show them these numbers and then ask if they have 6,399 friends on Facebook who would be willing to help them
Edited by Hawkeye 72, 30 March 2013 - 06:54 PM.
