That sounds actually awesome.
Has anyone so far made a game about killing Jean-Paul Marat?
With rubber ducks.
A small note from a guy who didn't vote for this project
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That sounds actually awesome.
Has anyone so far made a game about killing Jean-Paul Marat?
With rubber ducks.
Hmmm... I wonder how many units it has to shift to make a profit. I assume it isn't costing as much as HoI3, and I also assume it will cost a little bit more (fine by me)... I have no idea how many copies a game like Vicky2 is expected to sell... anyone care to hazard a guess as to how many sales would be needed to break even?
I'd guess somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 copies to break even.
You want them to live on a bread and water diet the next year or so!? I might well be wrong, but that seems like a low number of copies, even if one were to assume for the sake of argument that they would sell at full price.
There be no _other_forums_.
This is the only _forum_.
Btw, I wonder how much this thread has affected the sale rates of V2.
What if you start a new thread where you shall promise to shave the head, but also get big moustaches, an huge beard and start wearing monocle?
That would triple the sale rates.
we could launch a rumour that the whole forum will shave his head if victoria2 fails to make profit.
just for the viral-fun, fredrik. don't even think about for a minute that i'll shave my bald head at all
Depends entirely on the cost of development. None of us have any idea what PI's costs are, how much they pay their coders, etc.
Though I'd guess that by most games' costs, Vicky 2's would be pretty low. They already have historical data and a game engine, I would have thought most of the work that needs doing is just coding. And really, who needs to be paid in order to code?
I'd guess and order of magnitude higher. But like I said in my post several pages back it depends on how much revenue you get per copy (different outlets = different revenue per copy). I'd figure they're getting about 20 Euros per copy, and probably development will cost 4-5 million Euros to develop (not counting costs of the engine which is partly covered by EU3 and HOI3). However, copies sold via gamersgate would net them a lot more revenue per copy than a 40 or 50 Euro retail box copy. (I'm in canada I don't think in euro prices for games so I'm not sure the price point there).
The 2-3 Million euros for development would be like ~6 core programmers, ~2 UI guys, 4 or 5 AI logic and scripting guys, and then 10 or 12 artists, and 10 or 12 historical events guys. Then marketting. Not all of them would be there from the start of the project and a bunch of that would overlap. Say 40 people at 100k US/person (that's a potentially low estimate including benefits, salary, office space etc.) / year for one year (or 20 people for 2 etc.) would be 4 million dollars (note: dollars). But I would guess less than that, because you can't bring in events guys until you have an event system and some of your people will be on multiple projects, etc (think Music). There's a probably a lot of 'copy paste' that can be done from other games, but then you have the problem of Testing. QA & QC cost a lot and can Idle a lot of your other assets while you wait for them. I would figure at least a million bucks in testing. You have to pay testers, probably a couple of dozen, even at 10k each (and I mean paid alpha and beta testers here), so that's a few hundred thousand bucks just on testers, who also need computers, then you need to pay salaries of people who are waiting for the aggregate feedback from testing before making any sudden moves.
Obviously you could do it for less money than 4 million Euros, but you'd be starting to make sacrifices on how many people you have, reduced reduncancy etc. And to make back 4 million euros I bet they need to sell 150-250k copies. In addition to the direct costs of developing Vicky 2 they have to include some contribution to general corporate maintenance (including these forums), interest payments on past debts, general corporate IT and outreach (conference attendance), marketing, management and so on. Equally obviously one could spend more, a lot more (AAA titles are running 10-40 million USD now days, and some way more than that), and there would be significant return in the potential quality of the product with that money, but you'd have to have that much money to risk too. Given how this thread started, I doubt PI management is going to throw 20 million USD at vicky2.
Revolutions for Vicky 1 was different. They only needed a bit of coding work, some events and some art, but not for very long. The core of the game worked it was just messign with it. I bet with a few thousand copies of revolutions sold (at 10 bucks a pop) they could probably have broken even or made money on it.
If you look at AI war fleet command - the guy who did that game has a blog and he's figuring he's sold about 4k copies last I looked (that was before he got on gamersgate though). But that's only one guy, who wants to get enough money to triple the size of his business. PI is a big entity, the website list 5 people who are the sort of contact points for management, that's not counting all of the people below them on the corporate ladder.
Viccy1 has huge fanatic fanbase. The difference compared hoi2 is that viccy was hardest game in my life and thats why many player simply quit playing it. When hoi3 betatesters got game many probpably experienced viccy-stylish flashback and... well you got it.
Anyway I dont usually bother post here because it wont lead anywhere but now I want to say I know 20-30 persons who will buy this game and some of those definetly want to be betatesters (like I want to be) in future.
http://bloodandiron.invisionplus.net/?mforum=bloodandiron&http://bloodandiron.invisionplus.net/
I case this hasnt posted yet.
Jesus, I had no idea it would cost that much.... I would have guess €500k to make a game like V2.
Frderik, I know you won't go into figures here and I know V1 wasn't particularly well selling, but can you confirm that it was a slo-burner? I seem to remember seeing it high on the sales charts of GG as recently as a year ago
Frderik, I know you won't go into figures here and I know V1 wasn't particularly well selling, but can you confirm that it was a slo-burner? I seem to remember seeing it high on the sales charts of GG as recently as a year ago
me too, i'd have no hair already if i had to take that kind of decissions.
Stop, stop - you have already burst the development team size by far. Check mobygames for team size on the last couple of releases.
Those five contact points make up a not insignificant percentage of the whole. A quick check on linkedin tells us that the company describes itself as a ~20 people employee company .
This is not a good procedure for a game settled in the period of the industrialisation, we don't want to spoil the developpers! Lower the wages to 3 € per hour, or hire some kids to do the programming.
This is absolutely acceptable behaviour, a rise of 1000% is definetly necessary. But of course, Frederik should also demand to abolish all taxes for people with high income. It was a viable strategy in Victoria, why shouldn't it work in the real world today?
Hey, in America, we still do that.
Vic1 release was not so good, it picked up speed 2 years after release or so... but then it was out of stores.
That's just silly. I do not see how it would cost 2 - 4 million Euro to develop Vicky 2. It is my understanding that they just started developing it and that it will be released in Q2 2010. They already have an engine for the game so there's a lot of work saved right there.
Edit: And you just put the whole of Paradox on working on Vicky 2.
Why Victoria did not sell well.
When I found about the game I had a very difficult time finding it. I do not like buying digital copies, and it took me close to 6 months of looking for it before finding it it a strategy six pack from PI. If marketing is done on this game, I expect it to sell well.
When I found about the game I had a very difficult time finding it. I do not like buying digital copies, and it took me close to 6 months of looking for it before finding it it a strategy six pack from PI. If marketing is done on this game, I expect it to sell well.
He starts with way too large a number of employees as shown in my last post here. This skews his numbers to start with.
On the other hand, your time estimate is probably low. If the project kicked off by the start of next month and the release was the first day of the second quarter of Q2, you'd hit half a year. Sticking within Q2 we thus have anything from 6-9 months assuming a release on time.... and assuming that no work has been done previously and that the feasability of doing a Victoria 2 and preliminary design has mostly been accomplished in peoples' copious free time. Throw a few weeks or a single month of post release support by a fraction of the team at the project if that isn't covered by another budget. Then outsource your musical needs. Pretty soon you are talking real money.
EDIT: Sorry about that: I activated my calculator persona by accident. Making half-educated/half-wild-arse guesses is fun.
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Really?
More appropriate?
I freaking love moustaches!
But what of an monocle?
Just tell your kids; 'sometimes daddy wishes to be like a 19th century capitalist, and then you just need to understand daddy and play along with him'
What you want is a good old classic Squirrel-Stapled-to-to-the-Face, Nietzsche style, or a proper muttonstache, like the guy with the pith helment on the Vicky loading screen.I personally think a set of Franz Josef sideburns and a moustache would be more appropriate than a skinhead....
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