   Grant-funded project needs advice
  My organization is submitting a project to a grant competition, and if awarded, we'll create an online game as a major component.  The idea is for an MMO with scenarios that players will have to work through.  This is our first project of this nature, so we're having some difficulty estimating budgets.    For those out there who have done these, if you had about 3 million dollars to work with, could you give me an example of the major line items in a game-development budget and how you'd see the money distributed among those line items?  Thanks in advance for your help.   
  THE major line item is personnel costs.See http://www.sloperama.com/advice/finances.htm   ;Quote:Original post by TraceyJFor those out there who have done these, if you had about 3 million dollars to work with...Is that amount solely for development or does it have to pay for marketing as well?;  Are you intending to write all the technology yourself or are you intending to use some middle ware. If your going middle ware, there are a few MMO middle which u can use, they range from 100-200k per license from last looking at them. For the most part the overwhelming cost will be labor for content creation, support and core engineering.If your organization has access to cheap labor (ie student and interns etc..) you can probably offload some of that cost, but their lack of experience will increase development time and also increase overall risk of total project failure (I've seen too often companies try to hire students right out of the university and put them in lead positions, not pretty).-ddn   ;  I would recommend building your prototype with BigWorld Indie as it has the cheapest entry cost at $2,999 USD. That license gives you the client source, and script source on the server. You can then upgrade to the BigWorld Commercial license some point in the future to have full source access and support and this cost would be part of your funding. As noted above the vast majority of your costs incurred will be developer salaries.You can read more about it here;  Thanks everyone for the great responses. This is very helpful as we begin to formulate our budget.  And the 3-4 million would not need to include marketing.  This will be released as an open source in the education space, so the marketing campaign will be limited.  Primarily, we need to provide maybe 5 major budget line items with estimates.  It doesn't have to be exact, as we will likely solicit bids on the project from developers once the grant is awarded.  Thanks again for your help!   ;  If you are releasing the project as open source and don't mind using the AGPLv3 license you should take a look at this recent open source offering: Ryzom Open Source. The engine itself was open source for years now but just last week they opened up the entire project including the game, client, and artwork. It is used in the game Ryzom which has been in live for many years.   