You answered the questions in the post above, your website is very good. I wanted to check whether I was thinking in the right direction.

Last big (AAA) game I worked on had ~50 developers on ~$50k/year for 3 years.
That's ~$7.5M in labour...

Then add in 50 PC's, half a dozen PS2 and XBox dev kits, a 3-platform licence for the Unreal engine, a dozen copies of Visual Studio, a dozen copies of 3DS Max and Photoshop, a Win2003 server with AlienBrain, 3 years of rent in the city, plane tickets + accomodation to the US to negotiate publishing deals, renovation costs for building a sound studio, professional sound recording/editing equipment, motion capture studio rent...

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Quote: Original post by miminawewe
I checked out Quake 3 Arena and the credits say something like:
"ID Software is:" ...then followed by the list of people. In total they are about 11.

ID is an anomaly. From memory, those guys made Quake3 in 18 months on a minimal budget by working ridiculous amounts of overtime. An established team who are a kind of 'family' can pull this off - a brand new team couldn't attempt it.

BIG THANKS Hodgman. That's great info.
Anyone else with similar info?

Alienbrain. Ouch theres a waste of money right there.

Quote: Original post by miminawewe
I know Carmack is a Guru in programming games so can 1 skilled programmer replace 3 or more medium skilled programmers?

Yes. It's commonly estimated that a good programmer is 5-10 times more productive than an average programmer.

Quote: Original post by Buster2000
Alienbrain. Ouch theres a waste of money right there.

I second that!

We used it on our last project and... well.. never again..