Today I found out that one of the biggest and best received PC strategy games from last year, sci-fi game called 'Sins of a Solar Empire' cost only $1 million to develop and was done by a development team of 8 people. That is around say £700,000. There is plenty we could learn from games development companies with their fast and light development processes. It would be pretty easy to spunk £700k in an ad agency and not have too much to show for it.
How many flash-wank websites have their been over the last few years that have cost that much money? I think there was some dreadful Stella Artois go on an interactive film journey that was supposed to have cost a million quid. Given how difficult it was to navigate and how much you had to download you would be lucky if 25 people went through the whole thing.
Sins of a Solar empire has sold, SOLD, 500,000 copies since its release two years ago. When you think about that it doesn't make sense. We need to massively re-frame our expectations if we are charging more to develop work that is supposed to be given away for free to try to earn attention from people and it massively underperforms stuff people are spending their own good money on.
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