The Many Numbers of Game Budgeting

Considering that video games are extremely complicated business ventures, complete with countless human and non-human expenses and considerations, creating an effective budget and schedule for a game project is daunting. And since I’m working on a large game project of my own, plus planning one for this class, I figured it would be worth diving into what makes video game budgeting such a pain, and see if there’s anything to help ease that pain.

While searching for information, I came across an excellent blog post by Luke Ahearn on Gamasutra, titled “Budgeting and Scheduling Your Game.” Ahearn sets out exactly how daunting but critical it is to generate an effective budget and schedule for a project, whether it’s for a self-published game or when approaching a publisher with a proposal. Ahearn breaks down the process into multiple steps and points, which I’ll do my best to summarize here.

First, Ahearn explains you cannot possibly budget a project with breaking down the schedule and planning it. Everyone project schedule should start with an ideal scenario for your project, in which you assume you’ve got a great team and all the resources you could need to fulfill your many design features. Using this, you can generate your document, and that opens up the gateway to set out your final list of features and generate your tasks. Ahearn stresses the importance here of keeping your numbers realistic; this includes overshooting and undershooting your estimates to keep your publisher happy or your budget low.

Ahearn then goes on to break down the shcedule process; he explains that prior knowledge is your best friend here. You may or may not have prior experience with the type of project, and this way you can catch details you may have missed before or you can more accurately guess how work may break down. Ahearn provides four basic steps to scheduling game development:

• What must be done? Defining every aspect of your game and the technology and component required to do it; no skipping details either. Everything down the last sound and code library.
• Who will do it? How your team gets split up and who gets assigned.
• What resources are needed? Legal expenses for contracts, equipment, office space, software, etc.
• When must it be done? Deadlines must be deliberate and calculated; missing them can cause huge issues team-wide.

Using these principles, Ahearn introduces the use of a Work Breakdown Structure, which involves repeatedly breaking down tasks into the smallest unit possible with measurable time.

From there, you can total the amount of time that your project will take to complete, using a complete Gantt Chart. Based on your previous contracts with your other employees, you can use those time estimates to calculate their weekly wages over the project life cycle. Pulling together wage costs, software, hardware, office, and other expenses, you can finally construct your final budget.

After doing so, you experience an existential crisis and you realize how horribly expensive your project is, and consider quitting the industry to pursue your acting career and try to make it big in Hollywood. Then you become homeless. Isn’t project planning fun?