5 hours ago, swiftcoder said:

I'd be surprised if the fully-loaded cost of an engineer was much below $30,000/month.

That's a rather large salary if you're talking US Dollars.  I'm not aware of any programmers making that kind of money, not even the few high-paid DBAs that I've discussed wages with. 

Both Microsoft's and IBM's salaries for the Distinguished Engineers and Engineering Fellows --- basically people allowed to do whatever they want at the company --- are currently $300K, or $25K per month. (They also get big annual bonuses tied to the profit and research and patents.) Google is famous for above-average salaries, theirs are in the $125K-160K range. (Google's tier 3 is 2-5 years work experience, tier 5 is senior with a decades of experience, most of their workforce are in groups 3 and 4.  However, they're also for jobs in the most expensive cities.)

Various sites like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Glassdoor's numbers put the national values somewhere between $80K and $110K for most programming job titles across all industries, a few of the senior titles moving up to the high $120's.  US News says the median salary nationally is $98K, or $8.1K per month. 

But now we're drifting way off topic.

On 1/1/2018 at 7:38 PM, Sam James said:

I'm based in Australia - I've read the community here is really thin as most people with talent end up exported to the US though right? However, simple research turns up that wages are about 20% less locally

Yes, local economics determine the wages. There are jobs to be had.  Numerically there are far fewer companies and far fewer jobs, but the US also a higher population and about 14x more people competing for those additional jobs.

On 1/1/2018 at 7:38 PM, Sam James said:

Looking at it from a Private Equity perspective, my gut would tell me that I should not invest in an industry I don't understand. On the other hand, this concept is a huge passion for me and I've been thinking about it for years, and history tells me that when my gut is this confident on a concept (in my areas of domain expertise), I should execute. 

What do you think, and with that context in mind, would you have any further advice?

Games are a high risk investment if you're looking at a single shot for a single game.  Most ideas never become full projects.  Most projects never become full games. Most full games are not polished enough to be marketable. Most games brought to market never make a profit.

However, some games are very profitable. Those who understand the market and who have the ability to create solid products, create solid brands, establish a market presence, and bring the family of products to the market are much less risk.  When a company has 10 products it is okay for 6 to fail and 2 to break even if the last product brings in the money to cover them all plus some profit.  

That's why the joke above about Riot, they got extremely lucky with a single product, League of Legends, but attempts at 5 spin-off products have all failed.  Statistically they're still about market average for successes.

If you're serious about games as a business and you have the business chops to put together teams that can actually fund the major projects, you need to start by understanding the budgets.  Most high budget (but still not AAA) games are in the mid 8-figures these days.  Plan $40M-$80M.  Expect about 1/3 to be marketing, about 1/3 to be development, about 1/6 to be experimentation and prototypes. Even with that budget, expect to take a slight loss or break even on more than half the products.  A studio making those games need to have a wide portfolio of products or risk insolvency.

If you're looking for a "spiritual successor", a tiny project that has the feel of another game but nowhere near the scope or quality, an amateur game put together as a labor of love where salary is paid by evenings and weekends and sacrifices, you won't be putting out a high budget product.  People can (and do) release those projects with a few thousand hours of labor and a bunch of free or inexpensive tools.   Sometimes companies put together small tech demos or "experiences" as they're being called in the VR world. These often cost in the low six figures, but that is with experienced workers using tools they know well.

I wasn't going to jump in here but you mentioned you're in Australia and want to use CRYENGINE and make a game similar to Wolcen.

If you're set on CRYENGINE, I should warn you, it's still a pretty difficult engine to learn, and most of the programmers worth their salt are already working in teams on their own projects. The community is smaller than UE4 and Unity, but punches above it's weight thanks to the talent of the people who persevere with the engine. Issues like documentation are being addressed and community involvement from CryTek has been pretty awesome the last year or so. The 5.4 release added some valuable features and the 5.5 release promises to bring many of those to polish (expected around GDC 2018).

Your first port of call would be the official forums and after that I'd sign up on the community Slack. There's programmers and artists in there sharing their stuff and talking shop. CryTek employees also cruise in there in an un-official capacity. I don't think the Wolcen guys are in there, but they might be.

Now, for a first project, I would think an ARPG like Diablo / Wolcen might be a bit ambitious. Aiming for something quicker to achieve could provide a useful cash stream to keep you afloat while you get working on the dream project.

Personally, I am trying to create a toolkit for making action RPG style games, but the first step is getting the code for a basic walking simulator working. I'm making good progress there, and you might want to check out my Github repo to get an idea of what's involved in even something as simple as that. I only manage to work part time on it, and I've had to learn CRYENGINE from scratch, including the math and physics and art tool. It's taken about 3 years so far, alone, part time - so expect to budget a fair amount of time for your working demo. That said, I've made the code open source, so other teams can skip over a bunch of that work if they want to fork it.

There's developers in Australia; I'm personally living the quiet life on the Gold Coast. Thanks to the internet, a team can work as a virtual company - though that comes with it's own perils and issues - but don't think you are limited to whatever talent is in Sydney / Melbourne / Brisbane.

Good luck with your project!

One thing you might want to consider:
Do you want to publish a playable demo early, or just show gameplay videos? It might be a good idea not to release too early, since you risk devaluating your product.

If going for a video then a lot of things can be cut short - skill trees, balancing, networking etc. and you can focus your resources almost 100% on visuals. Make them look good - make the animations look tight (you can probably get far with bought animations and retargeting) and make it your own.

Much of the environment can be bought assets, but invest in good custom main characters and opponents.