Per year. Per game salary is usually more of a contract worker deal in most instances. You’ll find these sorts as interns, the QA staff, and programmers/artists that are used to outsource work as needed. Permanent members of a development company go by a standard salary like anyone else.

An average starting salary for a developer is around $50-70k. Consider a team of about 50, and then factor in about 4-7 months of work.

There have been text-based online games that have certainly come close, although they literally lack an extra dimension of Eve. They have the political side down.

So it’s the Karma of another game then?

While Sean Bean and Lena Headey are popular, they probably aren’t going to cost a significant amount of money. Furthermore, Square Enix is likely producing this at least in part with external partners, so even if the budget was a hundred million, they wouldn’t be paying that much out-of-pocket.

I’ve seen a lot of money lost trying to port something to PC. I wouldn’t be nearly as sure.

What gives you the idea that a direct-to-video CG movie is going to cost them hundreds of millions?

Easier, but not easy. Furthermore any game (or more accurately game engine) that was in development before a certain date won’t be able to use the latest features, because upgrading will always break something, which you don’t do when you’re finalizing a product.

Flag on the field: Oversimplification of a very complicated issue. Same CPU architectures make it easier, not easy.

I’m willing to bet that Square Enix is partnered with several other companies to produce both the anime series and the CG movie that are helping to foot the bill, as is the common practice in Japanese productions. That’s a much safer business decision than redirecting already tasked resources to producing more…

Bingo.

Switching between computer generated segments and live segments is incredibly jarring in most instances. The only exception I can think of is the Command & Conquer series, largely because it’s a strategy game. You don’t really see the people on the ground, just the battlefield.

Errr, those both were independent ideas by two companies that Valve bought. If I’m not mistaken, both teams that worked on them have moved on from Valve since they released the games.

I think most, if not all, of Yahtzee’s points are completely valid, although very clearly magnified for comic effect. He’s worth taking seriously, but not forming a complete opinion with.

At a high level, many review figures were part of larger enterprises and publications that would be sold as part of a bigger product. A review would be tucked into a newspaper for instance. This meant that the review was not the sole readership draw and as a result, a reviewer was more abstracted away from…

I can guarantee you I don’t talk about censorship much, because I don’t like using the word censorship unless we’re serious.

While this lawsuit is pretty ridiculous coming from this developer, it does bring up an interesting conundrum: Should people really profit as much as they do off the misfortune and shortcomings of bad games? There is a spectacular tendency to play up the failures and drill games for the perception of failure purely…

Since the other Marvel playsets were in 2.0 (which is not being updated), that’s a no.

You’ll need the starter pack, as it contains the game.

You can technically get by with the starter pack and the figures that come with it and the playsets. For instance, the Marvel Battlegrounds playset comes with the new Captain America figure, and you can get by with that alone. It can be more fun with more figures, particularly if you decide to monkey around in the toy…