News: Average User has no Concept of How Much Game Dev Costs
Recently, some clueless joe on Twitter said he will pay 10,000$ to the person who adds a multiplayer aspect to Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If he was going to donate to a modder who was working on it, that would have been fine but it seems like he was thinking that he could hire someone to do something like that for that kind of money.
Here is a long, detailed response to this which you should read but here’s the summary: 10,000$ would pay for about two work months of the average+ programmer. Also, networking is hard. The hardest networking challenges in gaming usually arise in fighting games because they usually need to be exactly per pixel and per frame accurate and, probably over distances where network traffic takes more time to go back and forth than it takes pro players twitch reflexes to react. You can see how important this is if you go back and read about the network woes of Street Fighter V.
Now, the demands of a PvE, open world, action RPG would probably be a lot less strict but these are still difficult problems. Especially if you’re talking about tacking on something like this onto a game that was definitely not designed for it.
You want a more current example? On the one hand, Battlefield 2042 is out now and it’s buggy as hell. On the other hand, Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is also out and it’s much better. Probably because the team is backed and overseen by a very strict corporate overland. On the other other hand, Halo’s campaign will come out in a week but the Co-Op campaign will only come out in May 2022. MAY!!!
343 Industries have been working on the Halo games for over 10 years! They are backed by one of the biggest corporations in the world! [According to Wikipedia] They are 750 strong! And it’ll take them — yes, assuming they have more going on than just Halo Co-Op — five months from campaign release to co-op campaign release.
And some people think you can just add co-op mode on a massive game for 10,000$.
Posted in Gaming, Less Interesting News, Practice, Programming, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.