DarthTHC Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 There's so much wrong with your estimate I don't even know where to begin but the MOST OBVIOUS point is the salary you used to average everything else off of. uhhhhhh where the hell do you get $85K from? It's not the average salary of someone in the tech field, it's not the average salary of an American, it's almost like it's just some completely random number you pulled out of thin air. Go do any reasonable amount of research into what the following jobs earn: - Game software developer - QA analyst - QA lead - Game Producer - Software Project Manager $85k is low. Especially for contractors. The jokers working at McDonalds because that's the best they can get with the liberal arts degree mommy and daddy bought them - your "average Americans" - didn't make this game (no matter how much it looks like they did). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Durasturan Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Contractors tend to be more expensive than direct hires and are paid for every hour they work (whereas direct hires may not be). Arguing that there were a lot of contractors only serves to increase my number. Direct hires tend to be much more expensive than $85,000 per year, especially good, solid game developers. Even if the game ramped up to 300 staff over 2 years, you're still way over $200 mil. And how long have you worked in software development? The senior staff, the managers of managers are probably pulling in around 150k/yr and the team leaders are probably pulling in 60k-100k but most of the grunt work was likely down by newbies fresh out of college and they were probably paid in cookies. honestly, how many of those 300 people do you think were unpaid interns and recent grads making 30k/yr? How much of the work load was unloaded to 3rd party contractors in India? You make a lot of assumptions. I'd guess that the AVERAGE compensation over 300 staff was probably closer to 45-60/yr Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agamemnon- Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 (edited) 1. "Going free to play proves SWTOR has failed." Wait why? So going F2P only 8 months after release is a success? Hell, even EA has said SWTOR is a miss and a disappointmeny 2. "IP isn't enough you need a good solid game." Ok. 3. "SWTOR doesn't have a solid game." Well that's debatable. Which is why it has bleed the amount of subs in the amount of time it has. 4." Because they copied too much from WoW which is a solid game." Wait what? People aren't going to leave WoW, just to pay more money to play WoW in space. SWTOR tried to hard to be WoW, and did none of the things WoW did correct. 5. "And anyone that tries to compete with WoW is a failure, every MMO but WoW has failed." That's not even true look at DCUO DDO EVE RIFT all are profitable and Those games have never tried to compete directly with WoW, nor were they hyped as WoW killers. 5. "And even WoW has failed because it's losing subs to all these free to play games!" Wait your conclusion is in direct conflict with your premise, I think you need to... WoW has lost subs because WoW has grown stale. People aren't going to leave WoW only to go play a WoW clone My responses are in red. Edited August 3, 2012 by agamemnon- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cleet_Xia Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 The estimate of 85K per staff member is WAY off base. 20% of those staffers were probably straight out of college and earning lest than 28k per year. The mangagers of the individual teams probably didn't earn more than 55K. Everyone between those 2 certainly didn't average more than 40K. Heck, the top ten salaries in the division probably didn't even average to 150K per year. 10 @ 150K (10 people at the top of the team 29 @ 55 (assuming 1 in 10 employees were working middle managers) 201 @ 40 60 @ 28K (idealist youth trying to break into a highly competitive industry for the first time) (1500 +1595 + 8040 + 1680)/300 = and average salary of $41,716 = less than half of your estimate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthTHC Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 And how long have you worked in software development? The senior staff, the managers of managers are probably pulling in around 150k/yr and the team leaders are probably pulling in 60k-100k but most of the grunt work was likely down by newbies fresh out of college and they were probably paid in cookies. honestly, how many of those 300 people do you think were unpaid interns and recent grads making 30k/yr? How much of the work load was unloaded to 3rd party contractors in India? You make a lot of assumptions. I'd guess that the AVERAGE compensation over 300 staff was probably closer to 45-60/yr Answer to your first question, over 20 years. I'm sure there was some number of fresh faces out of college. I'm equally sure that some of the top staff were paid more than enough to keep the average at around $85k. Remember we're not just talking salary and bonus here. Benefits too including medical, vacation time, etc. Plus overtime for contractors which was probably at straight time but still could be significant. I don't think any of the development work was outsourced to India, but if it was, the state of the game makes more sense. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Evironrage Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 It was an OK read: Nothing new to speak of. They did not really address any of the finer points of the game and thus you can tell the writer did not actually play SWTOR. Over arching themes about cost and lack of innovation are not new to this discussion of "Why SWTOR has not preformed up to expectations." Articles of this nature reaffirm why I read gaming magazines/articles to assess why a game did well or not. Business writers know squat about why many of us have unsubbed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soluss Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Similar article on Forbes about WoW that uses the exact terminology you referenced - bleeding subs. What do they both have in common? Don't discount the market shift completely. The difference is that WoW has subs to bleed and has made well more then the profit they expected. Wow has been out for 8 years and every game gets old. ToR on the other hand bled too many subs and isnt a profit. ToR has only been out 8 months and started bleeding subs after 2 or 3. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blattan Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 A good number of the 300 were contractors, and that number is not concurrent for the entire development period. People usually tend to be conservative with these kind of estimates - yours is not. Actually, those contractors were probably part of the remaining 300 to 400 Rich Vogel and Dallas Dickinson were referring to when they talked about managing a team of 600 to 700 people to produce SW:TOR. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andryah Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 There's so much wrong with your estimate I don't even know where to begin but the MOST OBVIOUS point is the salary you used to average everything else off of. uhhhhhh where the hell do you get $85K from? It's not the average salary of someone in the tech field, it's not the average salary of an American, it's almost like it's just some completely random number you pulled out of thin air. Not that I support what he said.... but you need a corrective reset here. Labor expense: wages, benefits, other direct employee related expenses. In most companies, new grads pencil out at between 60-80K to the company when you add all those things together. And given that any project of this scale can't be done with new grads only, and requires a blend of experience, I actually think an assumption of $85K is probably low, especially since labor expense for experienced technical staff in Austin runs closer to $150K all totaled. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soluss Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 The estimate of 85K per staff member is WAY off base. 20% of those staffers were probably straight out of college and earning lest than 28k per year. The mangagers of the individual teams probably didn't earn more than 55K. Everyone between those 2 certainly didn't average more than 40K. Heck, the top ten salaries in the division probably didn't even average to 150K per year. 10 @ 150K (10 people at the top of the team 29 @ 55 (assuming 1 in 10 employees were working middle managers) 201 @ 40 60 @ 28K (idealist youth trying to break into a highly competitive industry for the first time) (1500 +1595 + 8040 + 1680)/300 = and average salary of $41,716 = less than half of your estimate. Yeah, I dont think so. This is the video game industry and paid by some of the top companies. Managers making 55k lol McDonalds managers make that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Typeslice Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Contractors tend to be more expensive than direct hires and are paid for every hour they work (whereas direct hires may not be). Arguing that there were a lot of contractors only serves to increase my number. Direct hires tend to be much more expensive than $85,000 per year, especially good, solid game developers. Even if the game ramped up to 300 staff over 2 years, you're still way over $200 mil. Not everyone on staff was a dev, and in the grand scheme of things, overall compensation (expense to the company) is lower on a contractor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthTHC Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Not everyone on staff was a dev, and in the grand scheme of things, overall compensation (expense to the company) is lower on a contractor. In my over 20 years in IT, overall compensation has never, ever been lower on a contractor than an employee. When we use contractors it's for a fixed amount of time to solve a temporary staffing shortage. If we have a long-term staffing shortage we hire employees (usually by picking the best contractors). I imagine if your company offers significant severance packages to employees if/when terminated and employees are short-term and terminated, what you say is within the realm of possibility. Otherwise, no. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SirRobin Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Nice read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Typeslice Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 The difference is that WoW has subs to bleed and has made well more then the profit they expected. Wow has been out for 8 years and every game gets old. ToR on the other hand bled too many subs and isnt a profit. ToR has only been out 8 months and started bleeding subs after 2 or 3. That's irrelevant to this discussion though. You were discounting the impact of a shift in the markets for MMOs. It doesn't matter who has subs to bleed and who doesn't - the point is that the AAA paid MMOs all are. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Styxx Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 The same could easily be said for The Old Republic. Bioware gave us two fantastic Star Wars games in the form of the KOTOR series, which feature some of the best stories in gaming history Bioware gave us the first one. The second was Obsidian. His sources are a bit off. Not TOO FAR from reality, but he didn`t put the necessary time into research. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Typeslice Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 In my over 20 years in IT, overall compensation has never, ever been lower on a contractor than an employee. When we use contractors it's for a fixed amount of time to solve a temporary staffing shortage. If we have a long-term staffing shortage we hire employees (usually by picking the best contractors). I imagine if your company offers significant severance packages to employees if/when terminated and employees are short-term and terminated, what you say is within the realm of possibility. Otherwise, no. Do you have any idea how much a full benefit packages cost per person? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PlacidDragon Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 The estimate of 85K per staff member is WAY off base. No, its not, its actually a reasonable average (and probably too low).. How about some actual facts to season the rabid fanboy defending going on. Short version : In 2010 : The average salary across the entire U.S. 'mainstream' games industry was 80,817 In 2011 : $81,192. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andryah Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 overall compensation (expense to the company) is lower on a contractor. True. It's one reason why contractors are so popular to use for projects. Separately, having worked on very large high tech projects for years, I know for a fact that the various amatuer "dog walks" into how to arrive at the original Times guestimate of $200M is simply wrong. But the cost to develop is actually moot becasue companies do not recover development costs directly anyway.... so the entire futile exercise of ROI in the forums for months now is complete fantasy. It's a capital investment cost, a sunk cost in fact, which is not tied directly back to an operational ROI in a companies balance sheet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andryah Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 (edited) Do you have any idea how much a full benefit packages cost per person? I don't think he does. He just sees the contract rate vs the salary rate. The contract rate is an "all in" rate since the contractor has to pay for all the fringes and benefits him/her self, so it is factored into a higher contract rate per hour. And the company salary rate that he sees is wages only (minus all other costs to the company), so he is not comparing true $$ to $$. Edited August 3, 2012 by Andryah Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dystopic Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 (edited) I think a 100 mil minimum cost is fairly realistic when you consider the advertising as well. This game is probably the most expensive ever made. Before release and before the NDA was lifted I remember people knocking the game because of it's gigantic cost with the only thing to show for it being voice acting. It was kind of a big thing and was a major criticism that managed to cut through some of the hype going around and it was never once denied by the devs. To this day have the denied they 300 mil assessment? Edited August 3, 2012 by Dystopic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Typeslice Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 (edited) No, its not, its actually a reasonable average (and probably too low).. How about some actual facts to season the rabid fanboy defending going on. Short version : In 2010 : The average salary across the entire U.S. 'mainstream' games industry was 80,817 In 2011 : $81,192. EDIT: It looks like all they did was take the average salary from each of the 7 departments in that article - Completely discounting the weighting of the number of employees in each department, on each dev team. Edited August 3, 2012 by Typeslice Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lunablade Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 So smoke from Tortanic crash is now so big that everyone even outside of gaming field can now see it. This totally surprised me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dev Post CommunitySupport Posted August 3, 2012 Dev Post Share Posted August 3, 2012 Hello everyone. We had to close the last thread about this topic, as it was mostly off-topic and unconstructive. Because we had to close the last discussion, we'll be closing this one as well. We appreciate your understanding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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