I recently came across a team of about 1-2 dozen in size, with the following approximate breakdown of positions / members:

artists: 50% of the team.

managers: 28%

coders: 11%

audio: 5.5%

writing: 5.5%

seems a little high on the management end, and kind of light on coders. How does this compare with the make up of most teams?

I don't really think percentages are very informative here. What are the actual numbers? What constitutes "management" here? I can totally see a valid scenario where the role of the "management" types is to wrangle and serve as a production role for the high volume of artists, to make sure nobody is duplicating work and everybody is producing art that is actually relevant what will ship in the game.

What are the actual numbers?

looks like my original numbers were off a bit. i thought it was team size 18 with 4 or 5 managers. looks like its 17 with 3-4 managers.

in this particular case...

team size: 17

due to some ambiguity in titles and job descriptions the breakdown is either:

10 artists, 3 managers, 2 coders, 1 writer, 1 sound guy, or

9 artists, 4 managers, 2 coders, 1 writer, 1 sound guy, or

9 artists, 3 managers, 3 coders, 1 writer, 1 sound guy, or

8 artists, 4 managers, 3 coders, 1 writer, 1 sound guy.

That doesn't seem too bad. I generally think that ten people is about the upper-limit of one's ability to effective directly manage a group, so to that end having one person serve as the "art director" and primarily oversee and coordinate the artists in various ways seems reasonable. Having one person focused on business and legal issues is also not entirely uncommon.

I would expect at least one more producer/management role to both interface with the art manager and to manage the "other" development roles remaining (programmers, etc). So three management positions seems totally fine. Four, where the extra is another production role, seems like it might create a bit of overlap but it isn't egregious. Especially if these production roles are also contributing in other ways.

We have a Project manager (PR and marketing included), 2 programmer, 1 artist, 1 sound, and .5 writer

For most games I would think there needs to be more artists than programers, or programers end up waiting on assets, unless there was a good lead time for asset creation.

To my experience from a small (~15 people) and a medium (~200 people) developer body size, the ratio of artists : programmers was always around 3 : 1.

As Josh Petrie mentioned, it's impossible for one person to manage more than 7-10 people, so there have to be at least some lead roles + managers (producers). Even for 15 people you'll have to have at least one or two managerial positions. I, myself, am a programmer, so this is a bottom-up perspective :)

we have: producer, project manager, art director, and business guy. in the way of non-management duties that actually produce code or content, the project manager and art director seem to double as writers.

its a volunteer team. no pay, no cash up front, success only.

If it's a volunteer team then all bets are off. Usually you're lucky if people will give up their time for free so if you end up overstaffed in certain areas, you're in luck. What are they going to do, turn down an extra artist just because they don't have enough coders? You take whoever you can get, if they're competent and you have room for them.

In a commercial team it would be strange to have both a project manager and a producer - a producer is a project manager in every game studio I've worked in, that's their exact role - but they presumably have 2 people with similar skills and perhaps one is operating at a higher level than the other. e.g. The project manager is deciding overall direction, scope, and feature set, and the producer is performing all scheduling, bug tracking, etc.

Not sure why they have a business guy considering they don't have a business. Sounds like the idea guy, just wearing a suit.

For most games I would think there needs to be more artists than programers

Yes. Depending on the tile, i'd put the ratio at something like 5:1 or 10:1 artists per programmer. Of course that depends greatly on how much the artists and programmers must roll-their-own from scratch.

Not sure why they have a business guy considering they don't have a business. Sounds like the idea guy, just wearing a suit.

the managers, the writer, and i think the business guy too, are all "designers". nobody else has that in their job description.

I've worked on games that run the gambit from nearly even 1:1 programmer/artist, games that are heavily skewed about 5:1 artists to programmers, and games that are heavily skewed about 5:1 programmers to artists. It all depends on the needs of the game.

Generally there are more sub-disciplines in the art department, each needed at different times. Concept artists, character artists, environment artists, UI artists, modeling and rigging specialties, character animators, generalist animators, etc. Programmers are generally more versatile, but still sub-disciplines of client and server programmers, engine programmers, gameplay programmers, tools programmers, etc.

Then don't forget about leads and management. Good leaders enable their teams to be incredibly productive. They'll figure out the right things in the right order to get best value quickly, and at the same time they'll buffer the ever-shifting requirements and requests so the individual developers can do what they need. They'll talk to each discipline to see what the issues are and work with each other to smooth the rough spots; better tools for an artist here, different art bones there, enabling people to do great things.

The people listed above as "writer" and "sound guy" are important, too. Usually one "sound guy" who is skilled at composition, foley, and effects, can support around 20-50 main developers depending on what they're building. Otherwise you may need multiple people, maybe a short-term composer, maybe another who works with voices if you've got that, another working on environment sounds, another making sure all the button clicks and UI sounds, your explosions sound sound effects, and all the rest make your game sound compelling.

Usually there is a constant battle (in a good way) between producers who have schedules and budgets, designers who have amazing ideas and concepts, and developers who have to implement those ideas.

Then there is QA, often the unsung heroes, who bump into every wall, run every animation on every costume, and struggle to find repro steps to bugs like the server crashing every Thursday around 10:30 AM, which happens to be the first time a player completes a game immediately after the weekly logs were rotated.

It takes all the disciplines.

10 artists, 3 managers, 2 coders, 1 writer, 1 sound guy, or