/v/ - Video Games

If you could convince a bunch of codemonkeys and artists to move to Wyoming for development you'd cut down the wage by a good third or half.

>>16126097

Show me one fucking dev that's not a project lead with a pay of 120k a year. Even in commiefornia the best I've heard them paying a code monkey is 40k.

>>16126112

$120k sounds like a lot until you realize a third of that goes to state taxes alone and another third is in bay area rent.

>>16126112

That's not take-home pay, that's cost-per-employee. The more people you have on the roster, the more variables in the equation. A good guideline for the costs you'll incur over the course of a month by having an extra hand on deck is roughly ten thousand dollars. These are lawyer fees, development kit costs, computer equipment, electricity, office space, etc.

The Unmagic Reality part, specifically the "Take Home Pay" part, is what the dev is actually getting paid. The rest is just operating costs.

>>16126119

>Thinking anyone mentions a salary before taxes Do you want to know how I know you never earned a single paycheck?

>>16126136

To be fair, OP asked what he'd have to make before starting, not what devs would expect to earn. It's an easy enough mistake to make.

>>16126136

In case your stupid spic ass wasn't aware large tech and entertainment companies in Claiphornia are all in bed with the government and take a cut out of those taxes while owning most of the real estate. It's in their best interest to obfuscate as much of the effective pay as possible.

>>16126129

Ah shit, now I feel stupid for not taking a second to ponder that.

I wonder if there's ever been a success case of a studio that just has everybody working from home to cut back on those sorts of costs.

>>16126179

It's incredibly difficult to keep everyone on the same page without an office environment and a designated working space. One of the unfortunate truths of life is that the brain gets into habits, and it gets irritable when it's not allowed to form those habits. A prime example of this is playing with a smartphone or a laptop in your bedroom. It becomes harder to sleep at night because the brain isn't absolutely positive that this room is the sleeping room. Likewise, without a place to do the coding/arting/composing thing, people get distracted and goals aren't achieved.

Shit sucks, but that's how it is. I'm sure there are exceptions and someone's managed to get a team to make a great game that made money by doing it that way, but it's introducing another hurdle in a process that's already full of stumbling points and obstacles.

>>16126179

If they all shared the same apartment sure, but doing anything long distance is just setting yourself up for failure.

>>16125995

Invest your money in subtle ways to ruin the big western companies that still operate in the industry. That is a better investment on the long run. When they are all taken down, it will be easy and cheap for you to start your own game studio, and have the market open to receive your products.

It's less about money and more about the massive time investment. If you work full time and you want to run an entire game dev studio, forget it. The only way that is going to work is if you learn to code, design or do something, find a couple of like minded individuals and take a couple hours out of your free time to work on the game. It's slow but you'll have a stable source of income. You can commission good art and sound far more easily than you can commission good software and game design, so that's what you spend your money on and meanwhile leave the design and coding to people you know you can trust (you and your friends or colleagues).

>>16125995

How about make a small game first? Like Divekick or Footsies?

>>16125995

>Could I hire a passionate dev team to make a decent game for say $300k?

You can start by not hiring hipsters, sjws, or any of those diversity hires, or anyone with a tinge of marxism in them because you will lose before you can even start just because of that, and then there are those so-called 'volunteers' that turn out to be undercover sjws straight out of those pozzed unis trying to infect your own company by taking charge as either a 'community manager', 'pr/hr manager' or 'marketing director'.

A thorough background check is needed before you take them in, otherwise you're screwed.

>>16127683

And by them I'm talking about employees who are not any or all of the above mentioned.

>>16126651

Yet what would be an optimal approach to this? I can't really think of a realistic strategy that would have a noticable effect. The absolute best we can ever hope for here is the impossible dream of some russians figuring out a way to pirate multiplayer sessions, effectively decapitating the safe, online-only defense publishers have crafted over the past decade. This would shake up all the "pillar" franchises that hold major publishers afloat with guarenteed income. The caveat to that would be turning all multiplayer games into BRBRBRBR shitfests forever. But even that might not be enough. No, wait…

To take EA down right now, for example, you would need to completely demonetize FIFA. Whose base game is completely dead today in fact, it's all in the FUT mode now. All of it. Which is billion-dollar huge. It subsidizes all of EA's moneypit SJW fiascos. Despite being just, as it boils down, a fucking card game. So if you were to come up with all-access spoofing to unlock pay-to-wins like FIFA cards for every pirate or giving literally anyone the rarest of any and all the skins in your generic shooters, you might have a crack at crippling the entire F2P economy. Of every game. Ending it as a revenue strategy.

But can any of that even be possible?

>>16127807

Nothing that would work across all F2P models. Each one is a little different, despite being effectively the same, and each one is probably tied to a gashapon-like RNG reward system. You'd have to figure out how to get the function that rewards separated from the coin-drop mechanism that charges a bank account every time it's triggered, and there's no way to guarantee that all of the backend systems are identical.

In other words, there's no easy solution, but it's theoretically possible to break the most popular games and release them all at the same time to get the results you're after.

>>16126136

>implying jews dont make salary contracts on Net and not gross

>>16127866

But why would you need to go through the rewards system at all? If the end result is the skin why can't you use the skin itself as a starting point in propagating it to pirate players? Can't you bypass the rewards/payment mechanic?

>>16127947

Because the niggers that buy into this kind of thing aren't after seeing it for themselves, they're after making everyone else see it. You can hack a gui to show you whatever you want, but unless everyone is subjected to seeing you kick their asses in Fortnite while dressed as the fairyboy from Final Fantasy XV, you're only blowing smoke up your own asshole.

People are stupid. Stupid people want other people to think they're great. Greatness, to stupid people, is measurable by appearance. And if your appearance doesn't match a stupid person's idea of greatness, it's simply not going to catch on enough to do the damage to the F2P model that you want to achieve.

>>16126129

I've always heard a pretty typical rule-of-thumb involving unexpected costs of projects. Take however long it's supposed to take, and multiply by two and that is closer to what it will really be; that however much it's supposed to cost, and multiply by three and that is closer to what it will really be.

But seriously, OP, either way you're looking at "millions of dollars" even just to make a minimal pixelshit indie game in a reasonable time table. Your only alternative is to do it all yourself and take twenty years, aka the Dwarf Fortress route.

>>16128018

For what it's worth, the image I posted came from an article about Shovel Knight. You're not off by much.

>>16127976

>making everyone else see it

That is the goal of what I'm talking about here.

programming and pixel art aren't too hard

music and sound effects are hard

>>16125995

>How much money would I have to make before I could start funding my own medium sized videogames?

a couple million dollars

oh fugg,

>medium sized

way more than a couple million, probably closer to $10mil