I wasn't able to find anything on hiring teams for small development companies. I've heard some people say hiring about 5 people per department is good or hire 1 programmer, and so on. But does anybody have a good realistic estimate of the people an start-up game development company should hire to make an AAA title game on one platform.

Quote: Original post by GZPCEO
I wasn't able to find anything on hiring teams for small development companies. I've heard some people say hiring about 5 people per department is good or hire 1 programmer, and so on. But does anybody have a good realistic estimate of the people an start-up game development company should hire to make an AAA title game on one platform.

The schedule put together by your executive producer will tell you how many people of different skill-sets you require, it depends on the project.

Read http://www.sloperama.com/advice/finances.htm and http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson29.htm

The number of people depends on a lot of things. Read the team credits in AAA game manuals.

And read http://www.igda.org/introducing-games-game-march-2003

Quote: Original post by GZPCEO
But does anybody have a good realistic estimate of the people an start-up game development company should hire to make an AAA title game on one platform.

According to Ubisoft it is 450 people <a href="http://kotaku.com/5260424/assassins-creed-iis-team-has-tripled>http://kotaku.com/5260424/assassins-creed-iis-team-has-tripled.

Of course that doesn't actually answer your question, because Ubisoft aren't a start-up developer. Their team has years of industry experience learning to make games and working up to making big budget Triple A titles. Therein lie the real answer to your question....

Triple A video games are the Formula 1 car of software. No one will let you drive their Formula 1 car unless you have proven yourself on Go Karts, Formula Ford etc etc all the way up the ladder. To make a Triple A game you need millions of $ and no one is going to give you that unless you have proven industry experience making games. If you had enough experience making games you would already know the answer to your own question.

Of course you may have the millions of $ necessary to fund a game but just not have the necessary experience. In that case the answer to your question is 1. You just need one member of the team - someone experienced enough to know how to work out from your design what the team size/schedule should be.

Hello,

the number of people and their roles in a team depends a lot of the type of work to be done, the quality, complexity and other factos that needs to be taken in account when sizing.
There are no magic numbers where you have 1 dev for 2 graphists, that doesn´t work like this.
You need to sit done, think in the tasks that have to be done in order to develop your game, think of the roles that are needed, and then how much people per role. based on that you will have your resource plan for your project.

You will probably find more information about the subject if you search for project management resource estimation, project management processes in google.

The most wellknown project management methodology is the PMI (project management institute) which has created the PMP certifications and the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge).

Regards,

GD