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独立开发者分享可下载游戏开发预算的制定方案

发布时间:2011-05-03 11:28:41 Tags:,,,

游戏邦注:本文原作者是独立开发者Martin Pichlmair,他针对独立游戏开发成本这一话题,分享了他的相关建议和看法。

我最近才得知《愤怒的小鸟》开发成本是14万美元,而它创造的收益居然高达7000万美元,成为史上最成功的传媒品牌之一。

另一款值得一提的游戏是《No Time To Explain》,截止本文撰稿,它已在大众融资网站Kickstarter筹得了1.6649万美元,我认为独立游戏的成本预算一般都介于这两者之间(甚至可能更少)。

对于AAA级游戏开发者来说,14万美元的开发成本简直是天方夜谭,但对于一个iPhone游戏项目来说,这已经是一笔巨资了。每个iPhone应用软件的平均开发成本是3.5万美元,但即使是如此之低的预算,也还是有些开发者难以保证收支平衡。

事实上,投入14万美元开发一个回报率极低的iPhone游戏项目并非理智的决策,因为这个平台平均每款游戏的销量仅1.1625万份,或者平均每天44份,实际上有56%的游戏销量低于1万份。那么我们可以从中吸取什么经验和教训呢?

我们工作室现在正开发三款游戏,虽然暂时不便透露具体内容,但我不介意分享我们的开发预算。我们的这个项目最近获得了一些投资。要知道我们工作室位于欧洲,所以如果要获得这些资金,就得提交项目开发过程的具体计划和方案。我们的这个项目将持续到2013年初,每款游戏在发布初期的预算大约10万美元,移植和后续技术支持的追加预算是7.5万美元。

我和Vanguard Games的Martin de Ronde关于如何分配这笔钱进行了一番令人茅塞顿开的对话,他的建议是:不然就以10万美元的预算推动项目进展,不然就投入50万美元以上的成本。因为后面一个建议显然不在我们的考虑之列,所以我们只能选择前面一个方案。

我们的预算投入领域包括编码、游戏设计和市场营销等各个方面。除此之外,我们还有一些开发工具的材料成本以及旅费预算。以下的饼图显示了这些预算的分配领域,“编码”环节的预算最高,因为它还包括游戏设置脚本撰写等编程工作,以及控制系统调整等游戏设计任务的预算。另外要说明的是,“材料”环节的预算中,有80%属于市场营销成本的范畴。

dev budget-pie chart

dev budget-pie chart

我们的市场营销成本非常之低,而编码预算又占最大份额。假如我们在制定项目计划时就有这个饼图,我可能就会为市场营销环节多分配一些预算。不过,我们的市场营销活动主要集中于创建玩家社区,它的成本很低,也并不在我们的计划方案之列。

我并不是建议各位也效仿我们的做法,但需要说明的是,我们的编码环节花费最多预算的原因是我们正在创建自己的开发技术。

与其他独立游戏项目所公布的开发预算相比,我们很显然应归入低成本的行列。《Braid》无论是在市场营销还是游戏设计上,都属于独立游戏的代表,它的开发成本高达18万美元,《粘粘世界》的预算是12万美元。这两者和《愤怒的小鸟》一样,其预算都不在3.5万美元这个“安全范围”之列。我们希望自己的游戏能够像这三者一样收获足够的用户,并在游戏设设计和润色上达到与之相同的水准。

总体而言,我认为Rovio投入14万美元开发一款iPhone游戏实在是一个大胆的决策,iPhone平台上仅有一小撮这种类型的游戏,而且其中多数已经大获成功,《Rage》、《无尽之剑》和《粘粘世界》就属于这种典型。

当然,Rovio的成功也离不开发行商Chillingo的支持,他们共同分配时间和人力资源,将这款游戏顺利打造成型,降低了投资风险。换句话说,向一款可下载游戏投入20万美元无异于一场赌博。只要拥有一笔合理的预算和一个正确的团队,开发者就有可能降低风险。

我对独立开发游戏预算的看法如下:

·可下载独立开发游戏的合适预算范围应该是在10万至14万美元之间;

·最好为后续的技术支持和移植版本预留一些额外预算(虽然原版游戏大获成功时,你才可能用得到这笔钱);

·媒体报道总是侧重游戏销量而忽略开发成本,这一点值得各位注意;

·最重要的莫过于开发预算与项目需求恰到好处。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Opinion: Indie Project Budgets

[Indie developer Martin Pichlmair discusses how to best tailor indie games to their budgets, in this #altdevblogaday-reprinted opinion piece.]

I’ve recently stumbled across the numbers behind Angry Birds. Reportedly, producing the game cost $140,000, whereas the revenue generated approaches $70 million, making Angry Birds one of the most successful media franchises in history.

Another game that was in the news was No Time To Explain. The game clocks in at $16,649 on Kickstarter at the time of writing. Indie games are produced with budgets between those two numbers (and less).

For a AAA-developer, even a budget of $140,000 would be a joke. Yet for an iPhone project, this is an immense pile of money. The average budget for iPhone software can be assumed as $35,000. Even with a budget that low, you cannot expect to generate enough revenue to recoup your investment.

In fact, it is not a sane economic decision to invest $140,000 in a project for a platform where the average return is as low as on the iPhone. According to this analysis, the average sales of a number of surveyed games were 11,625 units, or 44 copies per day. However, 56 percent of the those games sold less than 10,000 units. What lessons can be learned from this state of affairs?

We’re working on a series of three games at the moment. While I cannot talk about the content of those games yet, I would love to take this opportunity to talk about our budget. We’ve recently received public funding for this project. Remember, we’re based in Europe. In order to acquire those funds we had to submit a detailed project and budget plan for the duration of the project, which runs until early 2013 in our case. Each game has a budget of around $100,000 for the initial release and a further budget of around $75,000 for ports and sustained support.

How did I end up with these numbers? I’ve had an enlightening conversation with Martin de Ronde from Vanguard Games (and formerly from Guerilla Games) and after that I knew what to do. Martin was kind enough to share his thoughts on development costs and his advice was: Either go for $100,000 or invest more than half a million. Since the latter was not an option for us, we decided to design the project so that it fits in the first category.

Our budget is spread between all kinds of development tasks, from coding and game design to marketing. Additionally, there are material costs for dev kits, and there’s a traveling budget. The following pie chart shows the distribution between those tasks. The “Code” task is a bit misleading because it includes all programming as well as gameplay-scripting and other game design tasks like controls tuning. Also, 80 percent of the costs summed up as “Materials” are marketing costs.

Still, our marketing costs are exceptionally low and our coding pretty dominant. If I had had this chart at hand when I planned the project I would have skewed the numbers a bit to give marketing a bigger role. Still, most of our marketing is community building, which is cheap and not in the project plan.

I would not advise you to take this template and apply it to any project. The reason why the coding piece of the pie is so large is that we’re currently building our own tech, as you may know.

Compared to other indie games that have published their development budgets, we are on the cheap side. Braid – a showcase in indie marketing as well as game design – cost $180,000 to develop. World of Goo, another indie darling, had a budget of $120,000. Both are in the “forbidden zone” mentioned above, as is Angry Birds. We are aiming at three games of the size and scope of these examples and hope to achieve the same level of game design and polish.

In sum, I think it was a brilliant idea of Rovio to invest $140,000 in an iPhone game. There are only a handful of games of this scope on that platform and most of them were very successful; examples include Rage, Infinity Blade, and World of Goo. The tide of no-budget games drowns most low- to normal-budget outings.

Rovio went with a publisher – Chillingo – and allocated the time and talent needed to bring the game into a shape that reduced the risk of investment significantly. In other words: investing $20,000 in a downloadable game is gambling. With a fitting budget and the right team, you can reduce your risk. I’m sure there’s a business term for this.

Take another grain of salt and apply it to my personal advice, which is:

* It looks like $100k to $140k is a suitable budget for a downloadable indie game.

* It is wise to acquire additional money for sustained support and porting, although you might only need it if you strike gold, anyway.

* There are more articles about sales numbers than about development budgets online.

* Of course, the most important thing is that your budget fits to your game.(source: gamasutra


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