Game Art Costs

How much are you guys paying for an 800x600 painted background and how much for a sprite (50x50 or 64x64 etc)?

Is $4usd per sprite a good price? Is $12usd too much? How much is too much?

You can have this one for free - I found it:



Not sure who painted it - just rotate it 90 degrees and nobody will notice.

I don't think you can pay "per sprite" as different sprites will have different requirements (frames of animation and such).

The way I did it was make a list of everything I needed, and settled on a fixed price for everything.

Well for my alien space beetles game the art's gonna come to somehwere between $1500-$2500. So far I've had 30 aliens done, maybe six powerups, a ship, ten planets. Three explosions. So let's say 50 sprites, all 3D rendered, all simple designs with no textures that needed to be painted. So that comes to about $30-$50 per sprite. But that was the guy I hired. Someone else might charge double for that same amount of work. Plus the animations were easy to do for my sprites cause they were just simple bones animations of arms and tentacles waving. Depending on how they're drawn, a hand animated sprite might be just as much work, or more.

So... for an animated sprite? Per animation? I'd say like $50-$100. Per detailed background? $250-$500.

Chroma, will you be offering a royalty on the product too? I guess this can be more of an incentive for artists. You could probably haggle for lower rates that way.

I second that. If you sell it exclusively - actually sell the copyright, then you may take a lot more. If you sell it for royalty free, non-exclusive use then you should take few. Sample:

800 pix exclusive: 1000 $
800 pix non-exclusive 14.90 $

Note if you sell the copyright, then the buyer may gonna sell it as non-exclusive content. This often happens between dealers and artists.

But the prices really depend on the situation, if you're a wanted 2D artist, or a complete unknown.

First of all thanks for the insight. Considering what a couple have posted for art costs, I've gotten a very good deal I think.

I had contacted a couple of artists and had both send me tile samples of what I wanted and price quotes. I went with the higher priced artist due to sheer art quality. It fits my game very well.