Man-Century

[peewee_RotA]

This is Zenimax' promotional week for the 20th anniversary of Wolfenstein3d. One of the links they posted is a really cool video of John Carmack playing through wolfenstein and discussing it's development (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amDtAPHH-zE ). At the end of the video he contrasts the amount of time that it took to make Wolfenstein 3d with how many hours are put into game development today and that the time investment has little return today when measuring fun gameplay.


So here's what he presented. It took them a little over 3 months to create Wolfenstein 3d. A typical game today is measured in man-centuries. That is a staggering number and there's two ways to wrap your head around it. If a team of 100 people worked for a year on a project, then collectively 100 years of people's lives were devoted to that project. That alone is a big deal

However man-hours are a measure of time without regard to lapses. So if you work a 5 day week for 8 hours you worked 40 man-hours, even though a week of time has passed. So 100 people working 8 a week hours for a year (52 weeks) is 208,000 man hours.

But that's not quite a man century because that's only 8 hours a week. A century is 876,000 hours. That means a team of 100 people working 8 hours a week would need to work a little over 4 years to complete a man-century.


That seems unfathomable, but John Carmack is drawing this from experience with their "sister" company bethesda.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_V:_Skyrim#Development

Work on Skyrim did not begin until Fallout 3's release in 2008; developers considered the game to be a spiritual successor to both Fallout 3 and previous Elder Scrolls games. The game was developed by a team of roughly 100 people composed of new talent as well as of the series's veterans. The production was supervised by Todd Howard, who was the director of many titles released by Bethesda Softworks.



 

So to tie this back to his original point. If quake2 had a development of about a year by about a dozen developers that is 0.6% of the manhours put into skyrim. Now how many hours has anyone here played Quake 2? How many hours in your life will you have played skyrim? Thinking purely with fun value, which one was a better use of the developer's time?