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If you get £1 million, then you basically still need to work, but you can always afford anything. Or you could use it to buy a house all at once, and sidestep the bank (haha) saving money. You can probably do as much with $1,000,000, because stuff costs less in the USA. Here in the UK, games are £40. Rather than $40
The budget for my game (in money) has been a few hundred $ at most. Mainly to buy a compiler and registering some copyrights and a company. It will increase maybe a few 1000 to get the game printed on CD (so I can sell it) but so far the money isn''t the problem. It just takes a whole lot of time and willpower to go through with it (especially when difficult bugs are trying to kill your high spirits)
As long as you can do most of the work yourself (I use only a few people to do the graphics, and one to do the sound - myself for the programming of course) and you have time to invest (e.g. you would do some kind of programming anyway in your spare time) then you can possibly do it. Since I have not done it yet I can''t give any guarantee that it will work in the end though :-)
I think the most difficult bit about making a profit is in the marketing. After all, we''re mostly technical people here, and not everyone has great marketing skills as well. In order to sell, people have to know your game, and in order for people to know your game, they have to be attracted to it somehow. Making people see your game is step one to making money, and very important. Once the game is technically finished, you''re really only halfway yet!
The reason (modern, high quality, AAA) games cost so much money to make : you need to have many talented salaried employees to do it. The odds of being able to produce one on your own or with few non-paid people are vanishingly small. Maybe 1 in 100,000. Heck, even many full staffed "real" game companies can't even do it and fail within their first year.
Yes, people here will tell you that you can do games on a shoestring budget with one or two guys. But what they're not saying is, you can't make the kinds of games you see big development houses making these days. Its simply unreasonable to expect to be able to do it.
You need skilled people working full time for several years to get a AAA title done. This costs mucho $$.
Edited by - daveb on September 11, 2000 5:06:18 PM
AAA aside, what are the chance to make a reasonable profit of what you think to be worthy game, if you sell it exclusively online?
And 2) if you send your game to be reviewed by websites, will they take a look at it? Can this (if the first reviews are encouraging) lead to a snowball effect, leading hardcore players (whose who wander the web in search of games they like, or read game forums) to buy your game online? I speaking of 1000 copies sold in a year here, nothing more.
Space Empire or Stars started like this, as shareware which were more and more downloaded/bought. Now they have seen the end of the tunnel it seems (especially stars), and they get reviewed on many websites.
If you''re gonna do it and have any idea of going head to head with a big name game: EverQuest, Quake III, ... then you probably should go ahead and have a budget like one so that you can buy the talent needed to get the game done. When making a large game there is an incredible pressure to get the game complete before the technology hurts you. If it wasn''t for the brand name, Diablo II wouldn''t have done half as well with the 640x480 technology it released with. There is always pressure to release your eye candy while it is still that and to do that you will need a talented team that can work hard to get the game out on time. Money helps solve this in a lot of ways.
Kressilac
Derek Licciardi (Kressilac)Elysian Productions Inc.
