New York development ‘cheaper than west-coast US’

Running a studio in New York City is cheaper overall than some of America’s most popular development clusters, an exec at Avalanche Studios has said.

David Grijns made the claim in defence of Avalanche’s recent move to open a new studio in New York.

“You see a lot of people posting on forums saying, ‘what are these guys thinking? New York is the most expensive city in the world’,” Grijns told Edge.

"We’ve done our homework," he said.

“Let’s say we were going to set up Avalanche in Santa Monica. Every time we wanted to hire a render programmer, an experienced animator or a good lighting artist, we would be competing with a hundred other studios within a 25 square-mile radius. Which means that same render programmer is going to cost us about 30 per cent more than it would to hire the same person in New York.”

Grijns now has local connections with New York City’s entire development cluster to prove his theory.

The studio told Develop last week that it is in talks with a number of staff hit by redundancy at THQ studio Kaos.

THQ is closing down the Kaos studio to save development costs, a policy in direct contradiction with Grijns’s claim.

Kaos’ final release was Homefront.