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[eobet]

Many, many, many, maaaaaany blogs and articles talk about this, but very few mention actual money (I've only found one place so far, and they didn't cite their sources).

We're about to start this research, but I thought I'd pop in and ask if anyone had done this already, and would be willing to share what they've found?

Now, I'm not talking about middleware, but rather:

• Developer license and dev kit fees.
• QA, testing and approval fees.

These are the two base costs, right? (And I know that the testing takes time, and thus may grow in size, but I want to know the base rates... price of admission, so to speak.)

Then there's the question of royalties... I haven't seen any figure for Nintendo/Sony, and I've only seen contradictory posts about wether the figure from Microsoft has doubled or not?

Also, when you do post figures or estimates, please cite your sources. Thank you!

[ElTipejoLoco]

To find out about Nintendo's rule and fees and whatnot, you can visit this site, which I believe is the official place to go.

Nintendo makes things a bit complicated when choosing prospective developers, it would seem, at least to me.

Aside from that source, I'm sorry I can't really contribute much else.

[ShawnF]

Copied & pasted from a post on the indiegamer.com forums.  Info is a bit old, but hopefully still accurate:


===============
To release a game on 360 live arcade will cost you:

* About 8 grand for a devkit and all the trimmings
* 16 grand for a pass through their testing/submission system
* You'll need a proper office - I tried having a kit delivered to home over the xmas holidays and it wasn't happening.
* Whatever it costs you to write the same game on a pc plus a month or two of TRC compliance and general integration stuff.

Figures are in USD. Hope this helps.
__________________
Regards,
Paul Johnson.
www.rubicondev.com

[eobet]

That sounds incredibly cheap.

I asked in #xna the other day, and they said 100k.

So imo, I'm still at square one since nobody can tell me where they got their numbers from.

I guess I will have to get on the phone with Microsoft corporate, but I bet it won't be as easy as just calling them to get the numbers.