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Development Cost of Patches

Started by May 24, 2004 07:05 AM
4 comments, last by Thygrrr 20 years, 5 months ago
How much time and financial effort was necessary for the first few patches of your last successful, commercial product? It''s something I can hardly find any info on, and I think it''s important from a business perspective to plan the cost to develop a commercial game.
That really depends on the game and nature of the patch. So that number could be all across the board. Some companies just release ''maintenance patches'' that involves just two full man-weeks of software engineering and QA. Others might have a horribly buggy initial release or decide to create a major free expansion to the game as part of their patch cycle, so they''ve got half the team working on the patch full-time for 2-3 months.
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This is exactly the reason why I''m asking - post your experiences, and what the nature of the project and patch was; and how much effort and money went into it compared to the project as a whole.

Vastly different scenarios are natural, and I''d like to read about a few.
I have got two projects done (kinda indie work) and here are my results:

1.game - Only one patch after inital release (fixes few bugs and improves compatibility with new devices)... took few days to make, around 15h (product dev time was 6 months)

2.graphic program - released several patches which fix few bugs, but mainly add more features to product
time - around 1 month of work (product dev time was 4 months)
One man-year+ for one commercial product that was fairly well supported.

This came out of hide (the publisher assumes he is paying for perfect code).
i think the cost is nearly ralated with the kind of games, for a kjava game , just a month , that is ok! , for a PC game , if you buy the engine, the speed will be enhanced! maybe faster 70 percent than you develop bt yourself!

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