Quote: "If you watch the end of fable it tells you how many different meals they paid for"
That's note entirely true, quite a number of people on Credits for games aren't paid out of the game budget but from the gross profits.
Remember there's far more involved in advertisement, publishing, public relations, etc. than there are developing most of the time.
Hell the team that worked on Perfect Dark Zero was 25 people in total; but the credits roll for almost 5minutes with over a hundred names. Only those 25 people were paid during development, the rest were post production, previous platform teams, etc..
The pay-rates of most of the developers ranged from £20-50,000 p.a.
Over the final 24months development time (when the 360 version started development)
Add to this the usage of Havok Physics, Voice Acting, etc. I mean it's good that music was in-house otherwise that's also alot more than it ends up being.
I mean you add in the electronics, software, electricity, etc.
You think "games are getting more expensive to develop", and to a degree this is true as they're taking longer. However teams are generally still the same size as ever for most developers, add to this inflation rates for both pay-rates and middleware.
A decade ago £15,000 was actually a reasonable amount to earn; nowadays however they provide you with enhancements to pay if you earn that little because it's practically welfare.
So the fact that pay has increase over £10,000 minimum per staff member isn't surprising.
You just think about it a while, factor in everything and you can see why it seems like it's begining to cost too much. This said, tbh I think most developers just throw away money most of the time now.
