ORIGINAL: Alfred
The individual wanted a particular "scenario" created. Can't recall the parameters which were not already covered by one of the existing scenarios, both official and by modders. Apparently AE is deficient in covering the PTO.
After several declarations of his serious intent to fund the development from his real estate earnings, Symon responded that he could do a bespoke custom made scenario to the requested standard of accuracy. It would entail entering into a legal relationship evidenced by a signed written agreement. IIRC, just for a single scenario the cost would be about $100,000 and take about 3 months.
These were conditions which our real estate professional considered to be unnecessarily formal. After all, anyone competent could just whip up the scenario in a fraction of that time frame for a fraction of the cost. Now how often have I heard such comments from people who have never designed any computer game but know all there is to know because they once wrote a short macro for an excel spread sheet and of course all the details (such as OOB) already "exist" on the internet.
Alfred
There is such a thing as a "go away price". When you really don't want to do a project, but someone keeps pestering, you quote an exorbitant price to make them go away. What is really crazy is when they bite. I think that's how my sister ended up working full time for over $100 an hour.
Oh and definition of terms:
ksloc - thousands of lines of code
msloc - millions of lines of code
The bottleneck to getting any all new game developed is not so much the money, but finding the people with the free time to do it. With the economy the way it is, there aren't many competent programmers with the free time to take on a major project. It also helps quite a bit to have programmers who know what they are simulating. You also need programmers with the skills to program native code and know how to optimize for speed. A lot of younger programmers have been spoiled by very high level programming languages that are fast enough for what they are doing, but not fast enough for a game.
For the data people, you need people who know a lot about the subject and know enough about business practices to organize the data into formats the programmers can take and incorporate into the game. There are a lot of people out there who can do research, but they don't have the skills to organize it. I ran into this with another project. I had several people generating content for a program I was developing. Only one really understood why I needed to get the data into the format I did (she was an unemployed programmer) and only one other could be trained to put it in the right format. I didn't have the unemployed programmer for very long, so I had to have the other person format the content from everyone else. Fortunately she was a skilled editor.
Organizing the entire project has to be someone with a fair bit of project management skill plus some experience leading projects outside of a corporate setting.
With an AE2 project, even if there was lots of money, you would either have to train some people who don't know much about the subject but have the technical skills you want. There is a good chance they might not be very enthusiastic and just work for the paycheck. Or you need to find people with convertible technical skills, who are available, and know the subject.
Bill
