How much does it cost to make a video about the game on your own

Let's say you have a game and a team that develops it. You need a video about your game and you have not decided yet whether to do it on your own or outsource it. Let's see how the situation might turn out if you choose the first: create a video yourself.



From this article you will find out what expenses can be hidden behind the decision to make a video about your game on your own. Be warned: this is a longread with furious production details. Go?



Written in Alconost



In preparing this material, we relied on our own experience in creating videos about games: we have made more than a hundred of them over the past 8 years. And to convert time into money, we used the results of the InGame Job research on salaries in game development . Based on experience and knowledge, we will try to calculate how much the average gamedev studio can do to create a video about the game on our own.



Videos about games are very different. Sometimes it's cutting video captures, and sometimes it's animation of characters or 3D models, or even animation. Of course, different complexity is also different labor costs, therefore, commercials about games can be significantly different in price. Sounds logical, but too abstract, right?



To get to the bottom of the issue, let's simulate a conditional situation. And using her example, we will analyze which employees of a game development company can participate in the creation of a video, what kind of contribution each of them makes, and how much - at least approximately - time each can spend on his own part of the work.



Let's start with three assumptions: what kind of video do you need, what kind of employees you have, and how you will build the video production process.

• Roller : for example, you need a movie trailer, lasting no more than a minute, to be placed on the game site and Google Play. Let the video be in English, with voice acting by a native English speaker, with music and sound effects.
• : , , , , , , . , — , .
• Process : You may decide to follow the Alconost process for creating videos : write a script, make a storyboard, record voiceovers, pick up a background track, put together an animation, edit music, add sound effects. It is possible that in your case the process needs to be tuned up, but how exactly can be judged only by knowing the features of a particular game and a specific team. Since the situation itself, the video and the team are conditional, let at least the process be specific and universal.

At the beginning of work on the video, the team will brainstorm to decide for which target audience the video is being made, which game features must be shown, what the main message should be in the video and what emotions it should leave.





Photo: StartupStockPhotos , Pixabay

Scenario

We will entrust the script to the narrative designer or copywriter - to the one who writes dialogs, quest texts or other messages visible to the user for the game.



For the artist, animator and announcer to understand exactly what they need to do, the script must answer the following questions:

• In what visual context will the whole action take place? Is it a simple gradient, flat detailed art, or a 3D environment? This needs to be dealt with at the very beginning, so that all decisions on the visual side are consistent. Add references to the script.
• In what order will the main features of the game be shown in the video, and in what way? If some features do not look photogenic enough (buttons, a lot of text, small icons get in the way), the script should provide for how exactly such features will be demonstrated.
• What will the voiceover be like? The narrator reads out the phrases provided to him without making adjustments to his taste, so the screenwriter needs to make sure that the voiceover text is succinct, accurate and foldable.

Photo: Free-Photos , Pixabay



Deciding how gameplay features are displayed can greatly affect the production process, or even predetermine it. Possible options:

• Simulate gameplay in the engine and capture video captures directly from the development environment (this is especially true for games on Unity).
• Remove video captures from a release or test build.
• Build scenes with gameplay from graphics sources (the required content, for example, location or inventory, is modeled from static assets, which are then animated).

, . , , , .

Suppose that in our conditional video for the script there will be 4 scenes with animation of game graphics in 2D (close-up characters, a rich assortment of game equipment, achievements, game logo) and 4 scenes with video captures, which the team decided to remove from the release build, edit, crop and embellish a little.



Let's say that the screenwriter spends 4 hours creating a draft, the same amount will be spent on making edits as a result of agreement with the team, and finishing grinding will take another hour. Let's add another half hour for the selection of references (the scriptwriter and the animator can mean different things under the words "brisk animation of the slogan, so it's better to find a good example) and the same amount for thinking over the equipment for the characters in the video. After all, the bracers of a frightened nymph do not fit the armor of absolute invulnerability, right?



Of course, time deviations are equally possible in both directions. Sometimes a script can be written in an hour or two, and sometimes it takes several days to reconcile and edit. Not to mention the cases when, when working out the details, there is a desire to radically change the script. But let's assume that in our conditional situation, 10 hours was enough to write a successful scenario: interesting, logical, and amenable to practical implementation.

Storyboard

This is the creation of static graphics according to the plot written in the script. Let us give this work to an artist who draws, for example, locations and game objects.





Photo: VitalikRadko , Depositphotos



First of all, the artist is imbued with the script, looks at the references and selects art from the already rendered assets (he finds the graphic sources of the characters and, of course, the bracers of the frightened nymph in the game graphics archive). Then he develops a visual style: prepares the background, draws plates, selects the font. Since the script provides for cropping video captures, the artist needs to think about how to compensate for the difference in the proportions between the aspect ratio of the cropped video (it can turn out, for example, 1: 1) and the height and width of the frame (usually 16: 9).



When the visual style is approved, the artist prepares a complete storyboard: he composes the remaining scenes from the ready-made elements and adds the missing ones. If it is decided to buy some parts for the video on the stock, the artist will need to enter the purchased elements in the storyboard: tweak the brightness or saturation, add a shadow.



Suppose that in our case, the artist devotes a storyboard to 4 hours a day and does it in a week, including one or two revision cycles. In this case, its time consumption will be about 20 hours.



Of course, if the video consists of only video captures, and the artist is only required to draw the slogan plates and the scene with the logo, the time spent on creating the storyboard will decrease. But if all or almost all of the scenes in the video are animation of static graphics, and even more so if this graphics needs to be drawn from scratch (for example, if you want to tell the background of the game world in the video), the time spent on storyboarding will increase significantly. So 20 hours for a storyboard for a conditional clip is speculative: in a specific project, it can be smaller or much larger.

Animation

The animator gets acquainted with the script, watches the references and animates the storyboard prepared by the artist. The animator also mounts video captures: the project manager (about it later) already shot them and provided the animator with time codes of successful fragments and instructions for cropping and improving them.





Photo: sonerbakir , Depositphotos We



assemble the animation for the already recorded voice-over track, so that the events in the frame go synchronously with the announcer's cues, and under the metronome of the already selected music - all this was also prepared by the manager.



Suppose that the animation of the graphics takes 30 hours, and the work with captures - 10. Suppose the team will like the whole draft assembly as a whole, but you can’t do without improvements. Let's skip the draft animation after three cycles of edits (let them take 4, 3 and 2 hours: the closer to the final version, the fewer adjustments) and give the animator another hour to polish the final version. With this course of work, the animator's labor costs will be 50 hours.

Animation time is critically dependent on the scenario. What happens according to the plot in scenes with animated graphics: "leaves are moving on a palm tree" - or "a ship sails to the shore, pirates run to the shore, the islanders scatter"? These events are of different complexity, their animation will take different times.

The number of animated scenes, of course, also matters. And with video captures, everything is not so simple. If you add patches from static graphics on top of the capture, or mount one large “canvas” from a dozen captures so that the camera can slide over locations and run into different areas, the upper limit of labor costs rises significantly.

Sound engineering

Of course, the track can be written specifically for the video. But suppose you want to save time and use an existing melody.



For a video, you can use either a "native" game track, for example, an ambient location or a combat theme, or stock music. Suppose that the track was selected on the stock - and they did it at the stage of storyboarding so that the animator could assemble the video sequence to the tempo of the selected music.



When the animation is ready, it remains to mount the music for the duration of the video and add sound effects so that the change of scene or the appearance of the logo is accompanied by the corresponding “hot” and “whim”. Then we do the mixing with the voice, adjusting the volume so that the music and effects do not interfere with the perception of the narration.





Photo: princeoflove , Depositphotos



Let's assume that the sound engineer will take about 4 hours to edit the music, select sound effects and mix, and it will take another hour to make corrections after agreement with the team ("vigil" did not fit - "boom" is needed, and so on). Total 5 hours.



It remains only to ask the animator to mix the final video with the final audio track - and the video is ready.

Management

The manager does everything to ensure that the process of working on the video is productive and the team is happy. Otherwise, why is this all?



In our case, the manager not only shoots video captures according to the script, selects the best fragments and selects music, but also organizes teamwork. He sets tasks, accepts intermediate results and coordinates them with the team. If corrections are required at any of the stages, the manager takes it upon himself to formulate comments and suggestions that take into account the opinion of the team and do not contradict each other.





Photo: ilixe48 , Depositphotos



In addition to team members, the manager will also interact with freelance artists. In our case, this is a translator and announcer - native English speakers (after all, our video is designed for a foreign audience).



We will ask a native English speaker who speaks Russian to translate our voiceover text and slogans on the dies. For the voice acting, we also turn to a native English speaker, a professional speaker. By the way, the manager will need to make sure that the selected voice actor does not have an accent or pronunciation defects.

The main problem that game development studio runs the risk of creating video on its own is the lack of a streamlined process of working on atypical subtasks. Even the search for a foreign speaker and testing it can take an unexpectedly long time - simply because this has never happened before.

It is very, very difficult to accurately estimate the time spent by a manager - so just assume that the project will take him about 30 hours. Real time costs can be both modest and significantly higher: it depends on the manager himself, on the team, and on the specific circumstances in which a particular video will be created.



The manager will have, perhaps, most of the atypical tasks, because he is involved in the process of creating a video at all stages. In this regard, it makes sense for the manager to take on one more role on the project - creating a script. Or vice versa: the author of the script could take on the duties of a manager. So the video will have a screenwriter, director who has a holistic vision, is fully responsible for the result and knows exactly why in the scene with the outfit you need to show exactly the bracers of a frightened nymph and nothing else.

Summarize the time

Let's calculate how much time it took to create the video in our case.

• Scenario: 10 hours
• Storyboard for 20 hours
• Animation: 50 hours
• Sound engineering: 5 hours
• Management: 30 h.

Total: 115 hours .



It took a conventional gamedev team about 115 hours to make a video about their game. Of course, our imaginary guys could cope faster somewhere, and somewhere they could get stuck for a long time. Maybe the team rushed with the script and when creating the storyboard, it turned out that not everything turns out to be shown as intended? Or when assembling the animation, it turned out that the script did not mention something important, and had to go back a couple of steps? Or maybe the guys managed to connect the developers to the creation of the video, remove the perfect gameplay from the engine - and managed to reduce the time spent on assembling the animation and editing the captures?



It is a pity that there is no crystal ball that would predict the course of the process and give the exact (or even better - a small) number of hours needed to produce any video about any game by any development team.

The actual time spent on creating a specific video about a game can be 20 or 200 hours. The exact calculation, which would be fair for any video about any game, is hampered by nuances. And there are dozens of them: from the specifics of a particular game and its photogenicity to the nuances of development, technical and organizational, which are unique in each case.

In light of the unpredictability of the process, into which the team is involved for the first time and which may take an indefinite amount of time, it is reasonable to order a video about the game from an outsourcing company, having agreed on the cost of the video at the stage of script certification. In this case, you pay for the product itself - the finished video, and how many hours it will take for the performer's team to create it is no longer your headache. And the game development team can take on direct responsibilities without changing clothes on the go from narrative designers to scriptwriters-directors.

We translate into money

"Do it yourself" does not mean "do it for free." The video is made by the company's employees, they receive a salary, which means that every hour of their time costs money.



Let's try to calculate how much the average gamedev company would cost a conditional video about a conditional game.



For this, we will use the study of InGame Job , which in 2019 interviewed 2,000 employees of gamedev companies from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine and calculated the median salary of specialists in various positions.



We will correlate the roles that game development studio employees play in our conditional project with the positions mentioned in the study. To find out how much one hour of work for each specialist costs, we divide the median monthly salary by 21 working days, and the resulting number is divided by the number of hours in a working day - 8.



It turns out that the time spent by the conditional command to create the conditional movie is equivalent to approximately $ 960. This does not take into account the time costs that the team needed to negotiate with each other when discussing intermediate results. Let us leave this time in brackets: the spread of time costs is almost unpredictable here, up to an order of magnitude difference, and the number of assumptions in the calculations is already approaching critical.



But there is something else that lends itself to a relatively accurate calculation, and we have not yet reflected this in the calculations.

other expenses

Photo: Arek Socha , Pixabay

1. : $20. 1000 Nitro. 1000 — 120 ( ) 8 .
2. : $100. , , . , , , : , 1 — .
3. Stock track : $ 30. There are tracks for both $ 15 and $ 50, and the price will increase many times if you need an extended license — for example, for use in a video that will be placed on TV. Suppose we have chosen a not-so-expensive track under a standard license, which is just right for publishing a video on Youtube.

Add these costs ($ 150) to the previously calculated amount. $ 960 + 150 = $ 1110 .

conclusions

Creating a video on your own leads to hidden costs, which can be roughly estimated at about $ 1,000. The team will be engaged in a creative task that can take an unpredictable number of hours, because this type of work is not core work for the game development studio staff.



To order an outsourced video - or do it yourself? Each gamedev team decides at its discretion.



If you decide to outsource the video, see what videos about the games make in Alconost .



And if you decide to do it yourself - do not forget to put on the bracers of a frightened nymph or other artifact that brings good luck.

about the author

The article was written in Alconost . We have been creating promotional and educational videos for 8 years , including trailers, teasers and pre-rolls for games and applications. We also localize applications , games and services in 80+ languages.



Read more: alconost.com . Follow us on VKontakte , Facebook or Twitter to be the first to see our latest works and announcements of new publications.

Our other articles on creating videos

• How to order a video about an IT product on outsourcing and get what you need
• Analysis of a series of promotional videos for the game Spin Voyage
• Do I need voice acting for video clips about games?
• Why videos show a conditional application interface instead of a real one: six reasons
• -
• :
• Alconost
• -?
• IT-