How much does a game cost????????????
My friend approached me and told me that they want me to make their company game for their campaign. The game will be very much simple. something like "flappy bird" or "mario bros". My concern is how much will this cost. At the moment, I only charge for websites, with a basic website starting at R2500 and after my friend approached me I gave a thought into expanding my business.
So my question is how much can I charge for a basic game I mentioned above?
So my question is how much can I charge for a basic game I mentioned above?
Comments
There is a very nice formula for freelancing work like this.
Obviously if the end result is higher than competitors price you may need to look at where you can cut the costs (Materials + Overheads) or if need be you may have to settle for a smaller profit.
What I mean by "per skill per person" is if a person is going perform multiple roles they must be paid for each role added together. If you are going to do the art and coding yourself you need to be paid as an Artist AND as a developer i.e. R20k per month.
For a commercial project you need at least 1 dev, 1 artist & 1 project manager/producer. Don't underestimate the work required by the PM; all the meetings with the customer, project planning, managing bugs, paperwork, etc. is paid work and it have to be done somehow.
So if you're the sole person working on the project you must budget R30k per month for 10 months plus R20k for sound plus R20k for legal; totaling R340,000 for a small game on a single platform.
This is a conservative figure and the reality is you'll blow through this quickly as scope creep and other changes encroach on the project; but it's a fair start.
So it depends how you want to do it
It's hard to predict how long a game will take, even a simple one. You want to avoid a situation where you're making a big loss on the game and you are forced to rush the production because you can't afford to work on it any longer.
If you don't have experience making a game exactly like the one you're being commissioned to make, you probably should quote your friend a rate rather than a fixed price. (I'm not sure if this is what you're planning on doing).
The other thing that is really challenging in game development for clients is changes being made late in development that really screw over the development process. You might want to ask some questions here about how to pitch ideas and prototypes, and how to communicate effectively about games with clients.
If you're working for a friend that might make it easier, but it might also make it a lot harder if things do go wrong.
I'M HOWEVER NOT VERY KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT DEVELOPING GAMES WITH CLIENTS.
2007: Mathstermind - 4 months, 2 programmers/1 artist, R85K budget.
2009: Colgate Smile Protector - 1.5 months, 2 programmers/1 artist, R100K budget.
2010: Tropika Supa Kick - 2 months, 2 programmers/1 artist, R150K budget.
2010: Desktop Dungeons - 2 years planned initially (4 years in the end), 3 programmers (added 3 artists/2 audio engineers/2 composers), R400K initial budget (R1.6M eventually).
Mathstermind should have been budgeted more, 4 months was a long time and we severely undercharged on it, even in 2007 money. CSP was very tight time-wise, should have charged more. TSK felt better, was also using the framework from previous games. The only reason we were able to keep running was constant consulting work between smaller game projects like these, I picked those because they have easy links ;)
All of these games had very specific milestone documents that we had our clients sign. We were very careful to manage expectations (these were small budgets and short times, so games often couldn't be as large as clients wanted), were super specific with times/resource costs and we made sure that we had front-loaded prototyping time at the start of projects. If we didn't make 3-4 prototypes per game, we wouldn't have found fun gameplay that cheaply.
At the end of 2009 we decided that work for hire wasn't a good idea for QCF - you didn't make any money if you weren't working flat out and while our clients did sign contracts that we'd make money based on sales/campaign returns, they never knew how to market games (and often made them almost impossible to get) so we'd make like R500 off SMSes for a game - that wasn't worth us dropping our costs to secure those contract terms... Hence Desktop Dungeons.
These days I wouldn't build a 3-4 month game for less than R350K for a local client - QCF has very small teams though, so our costs are pretty low (although opportunity costs of not working on our own stuff to sell is pretty damn high, so I didn't include that). International stuff is a completely different story - $35K for a game is nothing.
The transparency of information above is super awesome, and definitely what we need more of - experience sharing :)