Rovio has released a trailer for their upcoming game Angry Birds Rio which was produced in collaboration with Fox.
Rovio and 20th Century Fox join forces to create a new game, Angry Birds Rio! The game will launch with 45 dedicated levels based on the highly-anticipated motion picture, with regular updates lined up for the future. The game will be available for download on smart phones and tablets worldwide.
Craig Hockenberry, one of the developers for Twitterrific, has written a post on Stack Overflow estimating what it costs to develop a similar iPhone application.
We worked some pretty long hours. Let’s be conservative and say it’s 10 hours per day for 6 days a week. That 60 hours for 9 weeks gives us 540 hours. With two developers, that’s pretty close to 1,100 hours. Our rate for clients is $150 per hour giving $165,000 just for new code. Remember also that we were reusing a bunch existing code: I’m going to lowball the value of that code at $35,000 giving a total development cost of $200,000.
Anyone who’s done serious iPhone development can tell you there’s a lot of design work involved with any project. We had two designers working on that aspect of the product. They worked their asses off dealing with completely new interaction mechanics. Don’t forget they didn’t have any hardware to touch, either (LOTS of printouts!) Combined they spent at least 25 hours per week on the project. So 225 hours at $150/hr is about $34,000.
There are also other costs that many developer neglect to take into account: project management, testing, equipment. Again, if we lowball that figure at $16,000 we’re at $250,000.
