Hi everyone, I am doing a research paper this summer for my CS class about game development. Basically, I am writing the paper on game development from start to finish. Below are some questions I need information on. Any help would be greatly appreciated! What is the average number of programmers needed for a game? Typically how long does it take to program a game from scratch? How much money does it cost per year to develop your typical PC game? I think that's it, any other information you guys want to give would be awesome. Thanks again!

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Original post by brown student Hi everyone, I am doing a research paper this summer for my CS class about game development. Basically, I am writing the paper on game development from start to finish. Below are some questions I need information on. Any help would be greatly appreciated! What is the average number of programmers needed for a game? Typically how long does it take to program a game from scratch? How much money does it cost per year to develop your typical PC game? I think that's it, any other information you guys want to give would be awesome. Thanks again!

"average" in what way?

Some groups are as small as 4-5 people + outsourced sounds and maybe arts. Others are over a hundered or more on the whole project.

Development cycles for major studios seem to range 12+ months. The larger and more cutting edge the game, the longer it will take. Also depends on how many new tools they have to create to do what they want.

the cost, I'm not sure. Anywhere from 0-several mill.


In short, you are going to want to expand your questions a little more, and research some stuff yourself. Look up "postmortems" or however you spell that, I'm sure someone else here can point to towards a few sites that host ones from major games.

Gamasutra have quite a few postmortems on major games (free registration required).