How much would a team of environment artists charge to make all of Middle Earth? Thread

I'm just curious, for now. I'm expecting an extremely large number. When I say all of, I mean every town, city, cave, mine, mountain, tree.

This math may be faulty but here's a rough guess.

Skyrim had 7 environment artists, 9 world artists, and 7 level designers.

A game dev salary average is $95,000. En.wikipedia.org
EDIT: I just realized I accidentally quoted a game programmer's salary and not an environment artist's salary. An environment artists makes roughly half the salary of a programmer. I imagine that a Bethesda employee would probably make more than the average though, but it may not be by much.

7 + 9 + 7 = 23 devs.
23 x 25,000 = $2,185,000
Let's assume it took two years to create the environment in Skyrim, so: 2,185,000 x 2 = $4,370,000 to pay for them to create Skyrim.

Skyrim was about 6 square-miles big.
Middle-Earth is about 3,000,000 square-miles big, since it is a fantasy reimagining of ancient Europe.

Let's assume it took about $364,167 per square-mile to create Skyrim because $4,370,000 / 6 = $364,167. So it's $364,167 to create one square-mile.

Now let's use that money to create 3,000,000 square-miles. $364,167 x 3,000,000 = $1,092,501,000,000. Got a trillion dollars?

However, Middle-Earth isn't as content packed as Skyrim. As in, Skyrim has a lot of caves and locations contained within short distance. Middle-earth has large areas of fields and such, so that may cut down the cost a tad.

Edited by: Warner

I'd say if you ever want to do something at that scale it cannot be handcrafted but needs to be generated with a code and then retuned at the least interesting places OR improve the algorithm generating the content.

Let's say you split up into four areas:
- Woods
- Cities
- Mountains
- Caves

Then you could have one artist doing each set of props for the areas and generate the areas with smart algorithms.

I could throw out some guesswork numbers on this but I feel it wouldn't do much. However, what I can say is that doing it this way not handcrafting the world would save A LOT of resources and money.

Lastly, I just want to add that I think its an underestimation to say that Skyrim took two years, I'd say it took at least 3-4 years since they probably changed and iterated art direction a couple of times like all projects

Edited by: Sjonsson

I don't know precisely it would all depend on a few things ,
First and foremost the ownership of the IP as LOTR is trademarked copyrighted and all other kinds of legal mumbo jumbo
Secondly it is engine choice and polygonal counts and amount of LOD that will determine the art costs , this varys depending on the complexity of the engine , example : most average engines have a 3 LOD models setup , some have 5 or 6 LOD model stages... this would effect the cost greatly.
Making a Algorithm would save time and money , but that would mean your not recreating key points (not doing the requirement of the question)
Where are you making the game also determines cost ,making it in a 3rd world would be much cheaper .

Its worth noting that some games companys that try to do too much wind up going bankrupt -:
Gamespot.com