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Comment by sebzim4500 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this can possibly be true. Game devs make nothing, how did it cost more than a million dollars per (peak) employee working on the game? Are there some significant costs other than employee salaries?

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Even assuming those costs were _only_ employees and don't include licensing costs, contract costs for major voice talent, etc then you're still looking at about 1,000,000 per employee over the course of the games development. If a game takes 5-6 years for development, then you're looking about 200k average total employee cost per year, which once you factor in things like healthcare and other expenses an employer might have to pay doesn't seem too wild to me?

Probably stuff like offices, hardware, software licences, marketing, server costs and more together with the fact that they worked on it for 5 years (that would mean only 200k per employee) and had all those other costs for those years as well

I'm guessing there's some hollywood accounting going on too

also contractors as others have already mentioned

Fully loaded cost will be could to 2x salary. Spread over the entire game's development, this would come out to a couple hundred k per employee. This isn't insane.

My understanding is that a lot of work on TLOU2 was performed by contractors.

Maybe they aren't counting contractors as employees?

1 million per employee over 3 years is about 150k-200k net per employee per year (if it was salary only). 3 years is a low estimate and salaries are far from the only thing companies spend money on

According to wikipedia, The Last of Us Part II took 6 years to make, with over 2,100 unique people working on the product. The 200 employee number clearly isn't including contractors.

Even if we excluded the contractors and only included the employees, that's $183,000/employee/year. That doesn't seem that insane, considering that's the upper-bound cost per employee. One you start to add in any other expenses and the contractors, it would quickly approach reasonable.

I can't quite make out the actual number but Sony said TLOU2 took longer than Horizon Forbidden West's 5 years to develop. Let's just call it 6 years to make it an easy number. $220m over 200 people over 6 years ~= $200k/year/person? That seems if anything low, no?

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