How much did it cost to make a game on NES, SNES, or Genesis?

Steam indie games don't have marketing or production costs for retail stores and shelving space

Literally the most these retro indie losers have to do is send keys to streamers or YouTubers

I remember Tim Stamper (or maybe his brother) said in an interview that they were pumping out games for licencees on the nes for 50000 gbp a pop. This was late 80s or early 90s.

>>4173119
>retro indie losers
Who pissed in your cornflakes?

>>4173113
Upper 5 digits bare minimum. 6 digits for anything with a decent budget or development schedule.

Street Fighter II was something INSANE for its time like 2 MILLION, which was completely unheard of at the time.

>>4173323
I believe most of the SF2 money went to the hardware and then to the marketing.

> GS: And with the next game you worked on (Silent Hill 2) you had a lot more story control. Do you miss having control over a project like that?

>Takayoshi Sato: Well…I don’t know, I’m in the United States now, and the hierarchy is so different. When I worked on Silent Hill 1, the budget average was like three to five million, like Final Fantasy. Around the time of Silent Hill 2, the average budget was maybe seven to ten million. So it was easier to get power over a project at the time, because the cost wasn’t as much. But now games could cost, I don’t know, ten to fifty million? That’s too much. Way too much money.

>Yeah, those were my glory days, with Silent Hill 2, because after the first one, I got a Japanese Cultural Ministry award, and it was shown at Siggraph, and I got the personal CEO award from Konami, so I had a lot of power over my next project. And that was really fun.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2382/silence_is_golden_takayoshi_.php

This gives us a price range for PS1-PS2 games. Game budget is largely determined via the amount of staff, as most goes to salaries. So if PS1 was 3-5 million, then snes was probably 500k-2 million, with NES being a few hundred thousand. NES dev teams could be as small as 6 people, like the original mega Man.

>>4173113
I have no idea, but I do know for companies like Nintendo you had to pay licensing fees to gain access to development manuals and tools and have a game legitimately published. that alone was worth several thousand or a few tens of thousands of dollars.

>>4173380
That's some good detective work, Chauncy.

Bare in mind that a lot of the "cost" of big games is in marketing. Advertising ain't cheap buddy

And that most costs are covered by the publisher so it's not really the developers who are spending the money to make a game.

>>4173113
high end graphics workstations cost $10k-$100k back in the 90s but games were made pretty fast around a year of work.

>>4173396
Pretty sure PC master race games in the 90s took up to a few years to make, if they didn't turn into vaporware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Forever

>>4173113
Indie development of a pseudo-retro game is MUCH cheaper, actually. First of all, most tools are free. Second, you generally have ready-made free engine - Insanity's Blade was made in Construct 2.
Third, most of these indie games are made in software like Game Maker (or Construct 2) that doesn't require you to know much programming, you generally only need to know basics, if any - oldschool games had to be programmed in assembly/machine code for that platform.
Fourth, you have basically no marketing/distrubuting costs as everything is done online. There is a reason why it's such a lucrative market.
I'd guess that making a game like IB on Genesis would cost probably in general range of tens of thousands/ hundreds thousands dollars.

>>4173323
>>4173380
These two actually give us actually a nice timeline. By time of SF2, 2 million was a high budget, by time of SH2 about ten million was normal, and now it's in tens of millions (I think original Psychonauts costed 15 millions dollars to develop?)

>>4174960
DNF is an outlier, for years they didn't even complete an engine yet.

>>4173387
yeah, and that cost is ON TOP OF the development cost, not part of it

how much money went into the witcher 3? it was insane for a couple of guys from poland.

>>4173323
is there any source for the SF2 budget? Just curious.

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>>4173287
not him, but retro indie games are cancer. it's probably the worst aesthetics in games as of yet.

>>4173113
Depends on a lot of factors. Something like altered beast for the Genesis could be shat out quick and cheap by a few people even if you weren't able to reuse assets from the arcade version. Also, are we talking 80's currency? $6k went a hell of a long way further then than it does now.

>>4177626
Left is better, fuck Golden Axe.

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>>4177601
>how much money went into the witcher 3? it was insane for a couple of guys from poland.

what crack are you smoking?

dont know the sources but Donkey Kong was said to cost 100k (1981) but something like Dragons Lair (1983) was 1.3 million probably due to the film animation gimmick.

Thing about indie devs is that a lot of them just make games in their spare time so salary doesnt come as a factor unless they actually quit their job and signed a publisher. So using budget as a metric of effort is retarded if thats the angle we re going for here.

>>4177626
This. All the pseudo-retro indie devs need to die.

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>>4177626

Doujin games like Pharaoh Rebirth or Rosenkreuwhatever keep the tradition of good quality spriting alive.

>>4178076
Dude the sprites in Rosenkreuzstilette barely animate.

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>>4177626
Its not just aesthetic but also the feel of the game. Most pixel-shit indies will slap the artstyle on there and call themselves retro but pay no attention to difficulty, adding generous amounts of checkpoints and generally having stiff shitty controls among other problems.

That said I've run into a couple that pull it off well, pic related really nails the feel and aesthetic, even had a manual.

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>>4177626
This is a pretty shitty example, there are some gorgeous sprite-based indie games that have come out in the past few years.

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>>4177626
>retro indie games are cancer
Although you are widely correct, there are enough exceptions out there to validate the existence of the retro inspired indie games.

>>4178121
>>4177626
Older sprites sometimes were usually first drawn on paper, then drawn into graph paper, at least in japan, to visualize how it's supposed to look.

>>4177917
Oh yeah I was thinking of witcher 1 i think, they had a decent team for 3 and it got pretty big when you count all the voice actors and shit too, I still dont think their team is near as big as the ones at EA are they?

>>4178141
You dare say that?
There is only real retro and fake retro. The latter isn't worth spitting on.

>>4177990
>dont know the sources but Donkey Kong was said to cost 100k
That is not right.

>>4180665
truth

I wonder why no one tries to go retro 3D. Seems like people are allergic to polygons for the time being.

>>4180791
http://www.siliconera.com/2015/04/16/back-in-1995-a-japanese-mystery-adventure-made-to-look-like-a-ps1-game/

I never play it but there are some 2chan fags that really like it.

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>>4178121
>>4178146
The creator of Axiom Verge did a good job of modeling his pixel art after his sketches.