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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

Kind of surprised that marketing cost them more than development ($115m vs $150m).

> Kind of surprised that marketing cost them more than development ($115m vs $150m).

Kinda depressing, considering how game developers are typically underpaid and overworked... But as long as people are willing to put up with it, it's going to continue.

Depressing? What would have been more depressing is that they might not have received a bonus had there been no marketing and the game didn't meet budget.

> game developers are typically underpaid and overworked

And marketing people aren't?

I'm a game developer, and it depresses me how much undeserved hatred and contempt "suits" get form us "technical" guys. We work hard to make something, and they work hard to get it to the people. If you don't like the idea that games like GTAV should be advertised in order to get the money they deserve (and I think no one here disagrees that GTAV deserves it), you should be disappointed with the audience who wouldn't notice it if not for a marketing budget.

I totally agree,but aren't already gamers psyched about GTA franchise (I am!!)? Yes GTA deserves it.

Ok let's just ignore the argument of whether marketing people or developers work harder (which, personally, having worked in both sides, I don't think is even a question.) And let's also ignore the argument of whether marketing departments contribute positively to society as compared to development departments.

Let's just look at it logically; the budget dedicated to development determines the quality and quantity of what can be created. If you have a finite pool and < 50% is going to development and > 50% is going to marketing then logically you're going to get a lesser product than if you put say, 75% in development and 25% in marketing.

So yeah, that's sad. You don't even need to get into who works harder, etc.

I agree with your argument completely. The point of my comment was that the audience, and not marketing people, are to blame for that.

That assumes more money can produce better results. Imagine if the $115m figure came from legitimate, generous estimates by the development team. They wanted for nothing, had sufficient staff, sufficient resources, etc.

Then imagine marketing submitted their budget independently. Their proposal included some high cost, unique advertising campaigns and totaled $150m.

Both got approved.

In most circumstances, budget is a finite resource that people fight for, and one person getting more means someone else getting less. But for a very successful company releasing pretty much the world's most successful game, maybe they just gave everyone what they wanted/needed and marketing's costs somehow were legitimately higher.

I agree it seems weird to have the split like that, but not all development efforts are cash deprived, and if it isn't then more money won't help much.

Even if more money can't produce "better" content, it can produce MORE of it. There's no question if they changed the split to 75% dedicated to development they could have hired MORE artists and MORE level designers and ended up with even more content in the world. That's simple logic.

I'm not singling out Rockstar here, ALL huge companies have this kind of ridiculous split between development and marketing in today's world. It's just the sad reality of how business is done.

Often missed is the massive amount of motion-captured acting and voice acting in that game. How many voice actors just for random peds, hundreds?

Another big-ticket budget item is clearly music licensing and celebrity involvement for major-character voice acting (like GTA:SA had Samuel L. Jackson in a major role for example and some old-school rap celebs for "radio moderator" talking).

Not only celebs, Soulwax a belgian music group created their own Radio Station on GTA V...

Marketing has been a larger cost than development for quite some time now in the world of AAA video games.

Exactly. I remember a greater inbalance in the Call of Duty series, where marketing dwarfed development. I can't seem to find the source though.

$115 million? Wow. How many developers/artists/QA/management folks (or man-hours) does that buy you?

Roughly 1000 person years at 115k/person/year?

Which considering some people on the team are undoubtedly paid more, is not that surprising a number. (Although some are paid less too.)

The average salary in the game industry is 84k.

The quoted average salary is not the cost of employing someone though, there are always significant on costs.

Rockstar north is based in Scotland, so it's not going to be that high ;)

Pensions, Employers National Insurance Contributions, office space in the middle of Edinburgh (not cheap) - it's not _that_ cheap here.

I was only joking, Edinburgh costs a fortune!

I've noticed that people in the game industry make significantly less than other software engineers. Why do you think that is? The few software engineers that I know who work the hours that are the norm in the game industry make even more. I wonder what market forces are at work here.

Supply and demand. There's a lot of people who want to work in games, and are willing to work for less pay in order to do so, I imagine.

There are quite a few people who want to work on games, true. But I am not so sure the pool of talented engineers that are very good at the tasks game development poses is much larger than anywhere else in industry.

On the other hand, I don't think a very large portion of game development teams are engineers anymore. Not only are the tools much better, there is much more focus on other things like art, sound, marketing, design, etc...

Two years ago I had a conversation with a recruiter who was working with a company trying to build out a games-testing shop in Portland. They were offering people with 7-10 years experience $35/hr, and seemed shocked when I told them how low that was compared to previous non-games testing jobs I had held previously.

It's a good point that the proportion of employees who are engineers is probably lower than in the past. I wonder how engineering vs art/music salaries compare.

A lot of the engineers making games don't want to do anything else. They're willing to accept a lower rate of pay to stay in the industry. When they look for other opportunities, they're usually just moving from one games company to another. Since there a lot less games companies than there are companies that employee engineers in general, there is less competition and less pressure to pay the same rates as engineers may make at companies like Google or Apple.

I guess it's personal preference, but I've never found the appeal of working in the gaming industry. Seems so tedious.

/go back to moving bits from one column to another.

It's "fun". Working for sports teams is the same way. I just had an NBA team looking for someone capable of doing very nontrivial development in areas that border on computer vision and machine learning for $40K a year. (They ended up hiring a--as in, one--fresh college grad for the position. I look forward to seeing what they can come up with.)

Magazine work is also very competitive.

Economics 101. When a job has a halo effect, people will crowd into it until they bid down salary and working conditions to the point where they would be better off working at McDonald's.

There are probably about 50 profitable AAA game studios in the whole world. These pay quite well[1]. But there are just few hundred engineers working in all of them. The rest of the industry is either a new studio building up its team while working on low profit titles or an old studio circling the drain. These cannot pay well. People work there either to get experience and advance into one of AAA teams or are hoping their own studio will become a AAA itself.

[1]http://gamerant.com/activision-lawsuit-infinity-ward-salarie...

I see comments like this a lot on HN, and I think the difference is exaggerated. Yes, engineers make more outside of the game industry, but if you look at average salaries for engineers it's not that much lower. That $84K number includes, artists, designers, QA and producers. The average salary in the US for game industry software engineers was $91K in 2013 (http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10567).

According to sources that come up in Google (bureau of labor, indeed, glassdoor, salary.com) the average nation wide software engineer salary is close to that plus or minus $5K.

On HN it feels like nation wide game industry numbers are being compared to the salaries of the best engineers at the most successful Silicon Valley\SF tech companies. When you compare against top tier companies we're looking at a $20K+ jump. But if you start comparing against top tier game developers like Valve, Riot or Naughty Dog you get comparable results.

I know that salary surveys are understandably taken with a grain of salt on HN, but I feel like it's a better yardstick than the "common wisdom" that gets thrown around.

Coming from the games industry, people who work on games work on them for the love of making games, not the money.

It depends. Where I work, C#/Unity3d developer costs about 1,5-2 of a normal C# developer, although they do very similar things and have an equal technical level.

That money bought them things like this: http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/000028992/826f/GTA-5-mur...

(That is a massive painting on the side of a building, incase that isn't clear)

I'd like to know what are the ROIs for an advertisement like that. I can't really imagine that the people who will buy the game will buy it due to this advertisement. At the same time though, Rockstar probably knows what they are doing.

It's extremely hard to measure, but stunts like that seem to definitely add to "hype". I mean, it's being posted organically here on HN, isn't it!

"Hype" definitely gets sales. It leads to people checking out the game/movie, paying attention when they otherwise might not have - it's a form of social proof.

$800m in sales, first day. How much of that was due to marketing? Who knows. But it looks pretty positive to me, and stunts like this are part of it. Almost certainly positive, IMO.

The overwhelming majority of revenue comes in the first weeks of a game launch. For a major franchise like this, you safely know what minimum dollar amount you'll make. Invest in market for hopes of a big hit.

Sure, ROI is tough. But think about the wrong decision to not market and sales flops in the first 2-3 weeks. You can't make up that lost revenue from launch.

Exactly -- and from a GTA franchise standpoint, their biggest success is just hyping the release as much as possible. They have tons and tons of fanboys who all rushed to buy copies on opening night. There was no doubt this would be a success --

But to build awareness and convince more people to go out and buy it during the opening weeks, that's where a poster like this comes into play. Constant visible reminders of the release date turn a 500m release into an 800m release

The parent comment was referring to the development budget, not the marketing one.

Amusingly, that same building (which is in LA) has a counterpart in the game, advertising one of the game world's spoof brands.

"The game spent four years in full development, by a team of an estimated 250 people. Media analyst Arvind Bhatia estimated the development budget for the game exceeded US$137 million, and The Scotsman reporter Marty McLaughlin estimated that the combined budget of the development and marketing efforts exceeded £170 million (US$265 million), which would make Grand Theft Auto V the most expensive video game ever made."

From the wiki, 137 million to develop for four years with roughly 250 people (137000000/4/250) = 137k a year average per person

Question is, would it have made the game better? Or would it have been the same game with more content (so that you could hunt 1000 different animals instead of 50 (just throwing out number, I don't know the actuals)) but which nobody knew about?

My first internship was at a very successful (non-tech) company. One the things I learned there is how R&D costs were 2% of revenue, while marketing... 50%. And we're talking billions here.

I remember my first internship at a famous company. The first thing they told us was R&D was 2% of revenue. Marketing 50%. And we're talking billions here.

Watched Riddick in cinema last night and there was an ads for Grand Theft Auto V. It is rare to see computer game ads in theatre.

Here in London they show at least one ad for a game before the movie. London is also littered with billboards for this and other games...

Kind of surprised...

Congratulations sir. You must not watch much TV. It's understandable if they have commercials on all the sports, but I don't even watch much sports and I feel like I've seen the GTA-V spot a hundred times.

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