Elear's page

Elear wrote:

Gorbacz wrote:

Elear wrote:

@Kohl

Also take into account that Owlcat Games is based in Russia, and the wages in game development in Russia are significantly lower than in the US (and I mean _significantly_).

From the figures I've seen (e.g. here: http://galyonkin.com/2017/01/04/skolko-platyat-v-geymdeve-3/ ) average programmer employed in game development in Moscow gets ~$27000/year, average designer gets ~$17000/year.

Compare this to ~$80000/year-$100000/year average wages for gamedev programmers and designers in California.

This means that $900k for Owlcat Games is pretty close to $4M for Obsidian in terms of the man-hours this amount can pay for.

Well, this being Russia, you need to factor the bribes which you will need for pretty much everything.

Stereotypes are strong, I see.

Not at all. I've advised Polish companies on how to handle the "voluntary contributions to the improvement of quality of public services in the Russian Federation", which is quite tricky if you're trying to do it so that the Polish tax service won't go after you :)

Let's not delve too deep into this subject on this forum, but while what you said might be partially true in the public sector (while still being a gross exaggeration), I'm quite sure it doesn't usually affect software (and specifically, game) development that much, if at all.

Not necessarily. Now that Mac and Linux platforms have been unlocked, those games need to be developed as well. The Mac has a different processor and system architecture than a Windows machine, not to forget a different OS as well. And while Linux may run on PCs, the operating system has nothing in common with Windows, either. The game code for each has to be re-done from scratch. Especially when you have to optimize the code by using Assembly language. And debugging high-performance games requires special tools, and those can be very expensive.

Sorry for the long-winded dissertation, but I just had to post my thoughts on the matter.

Actually it won't take a lot of effort for them to make Mac and Linux versions of the game. They use Unity engine, and this engine takes care of most of the porting stuff.

With Unity, making a Linux binary of the game is literally as easy as pressing the button "create Linux binary". Of course, usually some quirks and problems arise, but usually nothing major or too time-consuming to fix.

Elear wrote:

@Kohl

Also take into account that Owlcat Games is based in Russia, and the wages in game development in Russia are significantly lower than in the US (and I mean _significantly_).

From the figures I've seen (e.g. here: http://galyonkin.com/2017/01/04/skolko-platyat-v-geymdeve-3/ ) average programmer employed in game development in Moscow gets ~$27000/year, average designer gets ~$17000/year.

Compare this to ~$80000/year-$100000/year average wages for gamedev programmers and designers in California.

This means that $900k for Owlcat Games is pretty close to $4M for Obsidian in terms of the man-hours this amount can pay for.

Well, this being Russia, you need to factor the bribes which you will need for pretty much everything.

Stereotypes are strong, I see.

@Kohl

Also take into account that Owlcat Games is based in Russia, and the wages in game development in Russia are significantly lower than in the US (and I mean _significantly_).

From the figures I've seen (e.g. here: http://galyonkin.com/2017/01/04/skolko-platyat-v-geymdeve-3/ ) average programmer employed in game development in Moscow gets ~$27000/year, average designer gets ~$17000/year.

Compare this to ~$80000/year-$100000/year average wages for gamedev programmers and designers in California.

This means that $900k for Owlcat Games is pretty close to $4M for Obsidian in terms of the man-hours this amount can pay for.