So we're looking at $60-120M revenue from the game, a good chunk of it goes to MS and Valve though.
I hope they made more... 60M$ would be bad
I've heard that salaries in the gaming houses are quite bad in compare to other positions in software engineering. But if we would take in an average we could find on glassdoors we could be looking at 80k$/year
Based on LinkedIn Relic has 290 employees, let's count with 250 - as LinkedIn isn't reliable source, not everyone is updating they profile when they leave the company / are just contractors etc etc ...
If we would take 80k as average (of course there will be lower paid people but also you have directors and such) we could be looking at 20M$ yearly costs just in salaries. You need to throw in additional expenses (offices, hardware, bonuses), I think it could be easily 25M$/year to run the studio. Maybe even more.
So that would be enough to cover the development of the old games / it needs to cover also new games.
But anyway I think AoE4 was a success and Relic is in good position.
1 game away from shutting down down. Also comments on the thread saying if AoE 4 fails then the studio fails..
I think this is not uncommon for a game studio. Making games is extremely expensive. You work on something for several years and have 0 profit. There could be also loans involved in making the games / investors and such...
My friend worked in local small (15ppl) games studio and they were always 1-2 releases from shutting down.
When they worked on a new game, they often needed to release shitty DLC for old games - because they knew that would make money and give them more time to work on a new stuff. Even though they didn't enjoy making the DLCs.
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Anyway making software is extremely expensive these days ...