Quote Originally Posted by Sinnertwin View Post
Is it really *that* much though?
I've seen the video, and it's a bunch of clever nerdbombers drawing up the plans with CAD files or whatever and then transferring that into 3d forms. It's not like the 80's were they carved everything out of wood and prayed it worked. Unless they're charging 10K per hour to drag a mouse around, I dunno?
oh yea, NRE is often the biggest cost in a design.
imagine, you've got one primary design lead who does a lot of the broad strokes heavy lifting, rough transformation scheme, then maybe 4 or 5 junior engineers working on the details (specific size of every hinge, fastener, type of fastener, the assembly process has to be laid out piece by piece to make sure it can actually be manufactured, how thin can pieces be before they're not strong enough, or how thick can pieces be before they don't fit in or through a space in the transformation, there are people working on the colour scheme, surface detailing, gimmick/mechanisms and all of this needs to be reviewed at some point to make sure no horrible mistakes have been made before going to prototype, someone going over the design to make sure it meets all the safety standard and requirements everywhere it is going to be sold.)

so maybe a month of time for a lead at $100 an hour
a month or two of time for 10 -15 other engineers, artists, safety engineers etc. at say $60 an hour
160 x 100 + 12.5(380 x 60) = 301000

of course this is a really rough uneducated guess, not knowing what sort of wages they're paying people in japan and the states, it could easily be twice that for something complex like Unicron or a Movie MP.
then there's marketing, artwork blah blah blah that they do for all their promotions, I'm sure that hooks into the company budget.
I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't already sunk close to a million in to this.