   Game Programming Question
  Hi everyone,  I am doing a research paper this summer for my CS class about game development.  Basically, I am writing the paper on game development from start to finish.  Below are some questions I need information on.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!What is the average number of programmers needed for a game?Typically how long does it take to program a game from scratch?How much money does it cost per year to develop your typical PC game?I think that's it, any other information you guys want to give would be awesome.Thanks again!   
Quote:Original post by brown studentWhat is the average number of programmers needed for a game?Typically how long does it take to program a game from scratch?How much money does it cost per year to develop your typical PC game?In my personal experience:13 weekends0$ not counting pizzas and mountain dew;  Hi five anonomous poster; however, in answer to your question, the amount of people it takes to make a game is dependent on how many people you can get, and  the amount of time depends on how well your project is organized. Games take art, sound, and programming if you can get more than one people the development time it takes to make a game will gradually be smaller than if you had just 1 person.   ;  it completly depends on what you want to make,is it a pong clone or a mmorpg, cause that would make a diffrence   ;  I guess I would be looking for MMOG game information, anything sports or RTS would be helpful as well.Thanks!   ;  one last factor would also be the teams experianceMMOG are very complex and not even worth trying unless your team has a lot of experiance, even for a profesional game companysports would be easyer as the basic premis of the game is very simple and creating a working prototype is easy and from there its just adding good art and ai and other misc fearutesnot sure how helpfull this is, just hard to estimate with so many variables   ;  A good estimate for the cost of a normal commercial game is $100,000 per team member per year (this isn't a salary thing, just a good estimate of total cost).Go to Moby Games to get credits lists for pretty much every game out there.Time frames are estimated 1-3 years for most commercial games (smaller time frame for indie and handheld games)Tom Sloper has a more detailed look at game finances here;  Look up some of the post-mortems on gamasutra - they often give info on how many people were on the team and how long the game took to develop (though I don't think they often list budget).   