I have 5 companies bidding to do the artwork for my game now.
Two are in preliminary stages and didn’t get cost estimates back to me yet. It’s possible they will go nowhere. One in China and one somewhere else (I think Europe).
One, in Brazil, quoted $60,000 which is absurd, because workers in Brazil make 1/4 of what we do. So it’s the equivalent of a US company asking for $240,000. This is 4 months of work on an Indy game. What the guy told me is he charges by meters, so if a spaceship is $100 a star destroyer 100x larger is $10,000. That’s a stupid metric. If this was a first person shooter and you were walking on the surface of the Star Destroyer, and the SD was the entire game, then maybe I’d use that much detail. But it’s a space game zoomed way out. Symmetrical with windows as filler is good enough. Either they are trying to rip me off or the communication is beyond horrible. Either way, I don’t want them, so I told them to forget it.
One, in the US, will be between $20,000 and $40,000, not sure yet. I think they could do a good job but they are very poor at responding when they say they will. So I might not go with them because if it’s this bad now I think it will probably be worse after I pay them.
Another, in the US, will be $30,000 and will get back to me in 2 days. It will be an art director, who formerly did WoW, and a couple of juniors. The communication is really good and I’m moderately confident that it will get done correctly.
2 replies on “Art bidding”
Tell the Brazilian company your game is in millimeters. Say every ship only needs to be 1 millimeter long but you need high poly counts. Then scale ’em up… you could get all your art done for $5 🙂
[…] Maybe it’s just bad luck with Brazil, but for 2 / 2 times I’ve talked to companies there now, they’ve tried to take advantage of me. First was the art team that wanted $60K to do the art to me, the equivalent of $240K in US purchasing power. Just nuts. Then I spoke to a web design firm, who while professional, wanted $11K for the website at $25 an hour. In terms of purchasing power, again that’s like asking for $100 an hour, which is unreasonable. Why would I bother outsourcing to be charged US rates? Also the hours don’t make sense – they put down 320 hours for the coding alone. How the heck does writing HTML take 320 hours? The art, I can see it, because time = quality. HTML is trivial though. […]