I can’t even tell if you’re ironic or not!
Costs of development vary highly by different countries and locales.
A fresh computer science graduate with some interesting side project, going into a start-up in San Francisco will probably make $100k/year. Make that an “enterprise” like Google, Microsoft, or Oracle, and it’ll probably be another 20-50% on top of that.
A senior will make more, and a lead/director will make even more.
Add $500/month for insurance (if in the US; in Europe this would be payroll taxes); 10% for pension and other payroll taxes; 10% for office, computer, electricity, etc; and some more for administrative (someone needs to do payroll, file corproate taxes, call the plumber, clean the office, etc.)
Meanwhile, game designers, QA, and artists may make less than engineers on average, but really good ones (lead/director level) still command a premium, and can make the difference between hit or miss.
Also, add producers and such to the overhead on top of developers …
So, assuming you’re outside this high-cost area, $60k/year as average developer cost (less for junior and art, more for lead and heavy tech) plus 40% overhead seems reasonable as an average, which rounds out to $7k/month.
I bet in low-cost countries, you can get away with much less (half or less!,) and in other high-cost areas (Seattle, New York City, Boston) it is more like San Francisco (two to three times higher!)
It’s really quite a range!
Also, this makes San Francisco a really bad place to start a cash-strapped company. Except, finding good developers and financing there is much easier than, say, Skokie, Illinois, or Lublin, Poland.
Checking the website Hello Games actually lists 15 employees, without titles, and is based in Guildford, UK, so they may be on the low end of the estimate I calculated, but I’d be surprised if it was as extremely low as $2M. They’d have to really scrimp and not hire much for the first 3 years to get there …