

Ask HN: Are Proprietary Game SDKs Worth $? - downrightmike


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tompko
If they're good, yes. Look at Unreal, id Tech, Unity. For AAA console games, a
large number of them license the Unreal engine from Epic. For mobile and
smaller games the Unity engine offers both Android and iPhone compatibility.
They are huge undertakings though, an estimate I saw for Unreal was 60-80 man
years.

~~~
kevin_rubyhouse
Do you mean it took 60-80 man years to get the Unreal engine to where it is
today? Any chance you could find the source for that or site you think you saw
it on?

Pretty amazing!

~~~
jgeorge
"man years" is one of many statistics used to sound really impressive even if
it's not portraying anything impressive, because the number scales so well.
"60 man years" is conceptually a long time, but it can just as easily be one
person working 60 years or 30 people working two years (which, from that PoV,
isn't a tremendously large project).

My favorite joke about the issue:

Q: What's IBM's definition of a "man year?"

A: 730 employees trying to get a job done before lunch.

