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This whole $150 million budget thing (with most of it being voice acting) bothers me...
bleed0range
Member Posts: 109
I keep hearing that TOR has a budget of $150 million so far. Which I never see sourced, so I don't know if it's even true. But every time it pops up I see people going on about how they think "most" of that is for voice acting. Well, I am friends with a professional voice actor who has done some VA for Cartoon Network and I can tell you that I seriously doubt that most or even half of that is contributed to just voice acting. He says most VAs make somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 to $75,000 a year. If you are a really popular and talented VA you can get more than that, like in most cartoons you are hearing the same people over and over because they get a LOT of jobs and probably get paid more than normal. The low end of the spectrum for new or low-tier VAs is around $30,000.
So while a large portion of that projected cost may be for voice talent, I really don't think it's as much as people seem to think it is.
Comments
Why should it bother you? It's not your money they are spending. People need to get a grip on things.
exactly, it's not all going to voice acting. I know many voice actors and they aren't living in solid gold houses and driving rocket cars.
However, the more voice acting one has the more money it does add on. It's not all about the pay but also in studio time (unless of course they have an in-house studio - very possible) and of course the editing.
In the end I think it's just the entire scope of this game. And they know that they only have one shot to make it great so they have to "make it great".
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Seems a bit off, yes. I'm also curious to what facts and sources lay at the base for this enormous amount of money for voice acting, for now it just looks like rumors that started to lead its own life to me.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
I think he's bothered by the lack of proof from people who make that claim.
It just seems game forums and in game chat is the worst when it comes to spining and spreading unfounded rumors.
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Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
If a company was making a game with a budget of 200 mil and said 150 mil was going to to the marketing department, people would talk. This is MMORPG; let the OP talk about, you guessed it, an MMORPG game in peace. This entire forum is based on discussing games that most of us have no control over budget wise.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Most people just use it as a way to complain about the game. They think that Bioware is focused on two things, and two things alone. The rest of the game is being ingored in favor of these two things. Voice Over and story. Obviously, at 150 million bucks, they must be right!
It's something you should pretty much ignore, especially if you know someone who does voice overs.
maybe.. its just not only voice acting in english... you should really pay attention to some of those vids they talk about err.. voice acting and development.
Besides its Bioware, they got the cash.
Whats worse is they are not being unique with their game. Talent tree? Class and level system? It cost them 150 million for this?
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
I would like some hard evidence of there actually being a $150 million budget. I've yet to be convinced. My estimate is around $80 million with a maximum of $5 million going to voice acting.
No matter what the medium, when 150M is on the line you will rarely see innovation in the marketplace, they will stick to what has proven to work well in the past and Blizzard and countless others have proven the success of Classes, Levels and even talent trees.
We MMORPG gamers punish innovation more often than not.
As to voice acting, you've seen how bad it is in most games, let's hope they spend a decent amount of cash on making it good.
I doubt there's any hard facts about how their budget has been broken down, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I've seen reports of the game costing around 100 million to make, but where does this 150 million figure come from?
Unless they have a whole slew of name actors doing voices, then it is highly unlikely that a "majority" of 150 million bucks is being spent on it. I mean, if you take into consideration that we are goign to hear a lot of the same generic voices spoken by most unimportant NPC's in the game and the fact that a lot of professional voice actors can do several voices, then it is very unlikely that this is the case.
They have a large budget based on two things. They are Bioware and they have the Star Wars IP. Bioware is about as close to an RPG juggernaught as you can get this side of Blizzard.
The KOTOR games were amazing, but they didn't really do a whole lot that hadn't been done before in the genre. They just tweaked it and did it better than it had been done in the past. I expect to see that same idea going into development when they are working with SWTOR. We may not see a revolution, but we will probably see more in depth worlds to explore, better quests, interesting storyline and a much more quality over wall experienece, even if that experience i just the same old game done with more quality and heart.
And to be fair, budgets for MMO's have been on the rise for a long time. You need money to bring down the beast that is World of Warcraft. And with all of the IP's being scooped up, it is inevitable that the cost of development is going to skyrocket.
Have faith in Bioware. They may be new to the genre, but I assure you they know what they are doing.
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/4115/Great-Expectations-SWTOR.html
Scott Jennings put that number out there based on rough estimations. But officially released information do cite that SWTOR needs 1MM subs to break even.
1MM subs at $50 per box and $15 for 1 month sub (a minimal definition of a subscriber) and you have a baseline of $65MM. So thats a break even point of 1MM subscribers to recover cost in 1 month. At 6 months its $140MM. So the 1MM subscribers to break even over how long is the question that gives us the budget.
Also, $150MM isn't unrealistic either. WoW cost $60-80MM 6 years ago.
The 150 million thing has never been confirmed, so in fact it's just a number people throw at it, the "1 million to break even" was also not official, but by an analist.
And 'most of it being voice acting' has certainly never been confirmed, and I highly doubt it: with the numbers the OP put forth hiring 100 people at $75000 wages would cost $7.5 million and it's not like these guys need to be present to do the acting during the whole development phase, they just have to read the script when it's ready.
I do think this game cost an incredible amount of money, possibly over 100 million; they established a whole new branch and office after all and remember that a game like GTA IV cost 100 million as well.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
True, not completely unrealistic. but I think $150 million is an exaggeration. It just annoys me people are citing Scott's 'estimate', which I see more as a personal belief with not much hard data to back it up, as fact.
It would be more accurate to call the figure Scott proposed a presumption.
wow I am seeing more and more ignorant ppl post about how costly the voice acting is, I even saw one guy say that voice acting would cost 50 mill, I laughed hard at that, one point so you all can understand, the hero of GTAIV got paid 100k for all the voice acting he done in GTA,
I think voice acting wont be more than 2-3 mill tops which is nothing but ppl are stupid, what can I say?
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My sentiments exactly.
Stop making excuses for them... it does not mean there shouldn't be innovation. It has to be in a smaller scale (you won't see revolution) but there are million ways to make it different without risking it. What we see now is just budget being used for too many things at once. They want to have everything in this game; thus there is nothing special about this game. It'll surely have everything, but it's the same shit we've played time and time again in a different setting, if they don't change their priorities.
Just to reiterate. It is extremely doubtful that the budget for SWTOR is 150 million USD, and also extremely unlikely that the budget for voice acting will exceed $5 million.
People are citing wild speculation as fact and then getting worked up about it, ridiculous!
I hope the budget is indeed 150million, because that's the only possible excuse that would make sense (but would still be unacceptable though).
SW:TOR, imo, can not cost 150 million to make. To date they have shown absolutely nothing that would suggest that this game requires a much longer budget than your average MMORPG. In fact, from what they have shown it would seem the game is somewhat lacking.
(stiff/akward combat animation, lackluster character models... only thing that seems to be coming along is the world enviroment)
It's of course just my opinion but I was really happy when SW:TOR was announced, however, the more they release info on this game the less interested I seem to become.
This nonsense is trite fear brought on by impatience and an overzealous nature towards Star Wars. I believe the proper phrase here is "chill the **** out."
I don't care if they spent $5.00 or 1 Gazillion. I just hope they make a good game.
Just because a voice actor makes 75k a year does in no way mean it COSTS 75k a year to hire that person.
Unless they are all self employed, and lets not forget that studio time is probably a lot more then what the actual actor earns?
I make 30$ an hour, but it costs 100$ an hour to hire me. ( I repair elevators and lifts. )
I imagine the difference in salary between what the actor earns and what it actually costs to hire them is even larger.
And that is not counting studio time and dev time to edit and implement those voices into the game.
None the less, I REALLY doubt they spent 75M on voice acting unless they went all A-list actors to do the job.
I do not think 150M for the entire project is in excess, it is probably more.
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Originally posted by Jerek_
I wonder if you honestly even believe what you type, or if you live in a made up world of facts.
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Give independent developers $1 million and they have a better chance of not only making a better game in every way, but one that's unique and fun too, even if they accidentally wasted 50% of the money on failed prototypes until they came up with an MMO that worked (is fun and succesful).
I don't see why ANYONE needs $150 million for an MMORPG unless it's almost all going towards marketting.
I guarantee half the people in this forum, even if they have no idea about game developing, programming, or business could develop the same game for less than 1% of the cost ($1.5 million).
I honestly want to know where the $150 million goes to. Do they hire 100 computer geeks who do nothing but watch porn while playing WoW 7.9 out of 8 hours a day?
And I don't care what anyone here says. Programmers are a joke. They are payed all this money to be lazy and slack off, doing little work. I'd know, because my entire family are programmers. In fact, my older brother had to stop working because in ONE day he finished 3 weeks worth of work, just doing his job normally. But we have to work inefficiently and be lazy. Why? Because if programmers actually programmed during their work hours, things would be developed so quickly they would run out of things to do and would end up no longer having a job.
Or maybe I'm wrong... and the majority of programmers do work very hard, long hours, and do the best they can. If that's true, then the majority of programmers just plain suck at programming and don't know what they're doing. This...I believe...