D
Darth Tagnan
Guest
One thing that always grabbed me was that companies like Bethesda and EA frequently spend as much on advertising as they do on development. I don't have any figures handy but on one recent EA release the marketing budget was released and it was shocking. The same thing is true with many big budget movies. A huge amount is spent on marketing. Historically Larian does not spend nearly as much on marketing (they might have spent more on D:OS-2 not sure) so when you consider the cost to make a game you have to include the marketing cost.
I'm strictly focusing on the cost of hiring people.
The reason I don't care about marketing budgets here, is that all these games have them - regardless of how many people are involved in actually creating the material. Advertising isn't necessarily about manpower - but about how much money you're spending.
Larian might not have a lot of PR people employed, but they do advertise their games and they do quite a lot of marketing as well. They had a ton of PR videos made for DOS2 - for instance.
When I consider the team size of other "modestly sized" developers, including Piranha Bytes, InXile and OtherSide - it's my strong impression that their development teams are significantly smaller than 100+ people.
Well, obviously my mistake has been to compare them with these developers, because I guess they're a lot bigger than I thought.
I wonder how Obsidian compares? Obsidian is involved in a ton of games at all times, it seems - so it's sort of a different situation.
Also consider the console revenue for D:OS. I don't know what sales were like but the 1.5 million that was quoted was just for PC; they also sold a few units on consoles.
According to VGchartz (whatever that is) there were more than 900K physical copies sold for consoles (more if you include digital copies).
I haven't forgotten console games.