BioWare makes role-playing games. It's going to be slightly different, depending on the genre.
From our perspective, a game development life cycle typically takes three years. It could be as short as two years if we're benchmarking off existing technologies. It could be as long as four years, maybe even five years, if we're building a new franchise, a new IP, from the ground up. But on average, two and a half to three and a half years is typically the timeframe.
We start with a fairly small team. They're typically content creators. They're the ones who are laying out the general design of the game, what they want the game mechanics to be, where in the world it wants to be. That's more on the creative aspect of it. We do that phase. Then we'll move into a prototype phase, where we will start to think about the features we want to have in the game and then start to test them. That's proof of concept. That's where technology starts to kick in for us.