Whiting also says there were six contractors for programming and QA. To give our estimate plenty of buffer, let’s assume Epic, as a leading games company, is attracting and keeping top talent so let’s take the top salary figure of $130,000 and bump it up to $150,000 as our guess for the salary of those who worked full-time on Robo Recall.įor 15 full-time staff for a year starts our estimate at $2.25 million. Game Industry Career Guide cites sources putting game developer salaries somewhere between $70,000 and $130,000 annually, depending upon experience. I reached out to some industry vets to check the following estimates against their experiences in game development. With that information, we can rough out the true scope of the game’s production with a little back-of-the-envelope math. I also reached out to Sweeney to ask for clarification he referred me back to Whiting’s remarks regarding the team size and added, “I think that’s the best comparable measure of the resources required to develop a game of the scope of Robo Recall.” Ready Your Envelopes We also had a few people we borrowed for other teams at Epic for a few tasks like rigging and narrative for short bursts.” “In addition, we had six contractors for gameplay programming and QA, as well as some art and audio help through outsourcing.
#ROBO RECALL UNPLUGGED FULL#
“There were around 15 full-time employees for about a year, with the team starting to be assembled right after GDC 2016 and building over a few weeks to full size,” he told Road to VR. Whiting understandably didn’t want to get into specific figures, but laid out the scope of the team that created the game. After all, the game is completely free, but Epic almost certainly would want some upside on what the game would have earned if it had been launched with a price attached. “He may have been referring to something other than the $10 million Gears budget that some people inferred from another interview.”Ĭolloquial use of the terms “budget” and “funding” is a likely root of the misunderstanding what Oculus paid Epic to create Robo Recall is likely very different than how much the game cost to produce. “I’d have to check with Tim on that,” Whiting said in a recent interview with Road to VR when asked about Sweeney’s remarks. Epic’s Technical Director of VR & AR, Nick Whiting, who worked closely on Robo Recall, hints that the game’s budget was actually much more conservative. 'Robo Recall' Behind-the-scenes – Insights & Artwork from Epic Games Lost in Translationīut it seems that something was lost in translation. A nugget of info that’s been spread far and wide in the VR space. That statement, taken with another in a 2007 Wired interview with Epic Games Vice President Mark Rein, who said that the original Gears of War had a budget of “somewhere between nine and ten million dollars.” This was very reasonably presumed to indicate that Robo Recall’s budget fell near the $10 million mark.
#ROBO RECALL UNPLUGGED FOR FREE#
The suggestion of a $10 million budget started with an interview with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney at last year’s VRX conference where he addressed the fact that Oculus had offered to fund production of game so that it could be published for free on their platform, saying that “Oculus is funding Robo Recall which has a budget that’s close to the budget of the entire first Gears of War (2006) game.” Robo Recall is great, but, it turns out, not $10-million-great.
It’s certainly a compliment to the small team at Epic Games responsible for the game that the notion of a $10 million production budget was so widely spread and accepted. Robo Recall, one of the best looking games available on a VR headset today, actually cost a lot less to produce than the rumored $10 million.
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