| HappySqurriel said: @Groucho Lets compare apples to apples ... Ratchet and Clank took Insomniac 40 developers 18 months to develop (a feat you said was the sign of shovelware in a previous thread) and Ratchet and Clank Future took insomniac 70 full time developers, 30 shared developers, and 25 contractors 23 months to complete. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2842/postmortem_insomniac_games_.php?page=3 You seem to be the only person in the entire videogame industry to think that there has not been an explosion in development costs from the previous generation to the current generation. |
I think you misunderstand my point of view. Costs have gone up. What I'm saying is that costs have gone up for the Wii as well -- but only if you want to produce something that appears to the user as being high quality. These "Wii development costs are 1/4th to 1/3rd" of HD costs are correct, but its not for the reason that many people on the forum seem to think.
Because so little money (yes last gen games cost about as much -- "quality" is a moving picture, even for the Wii -- I assumed you could deduce that for yourself) is spent on Wii development, Wii games tend to come out with relatively low sales numbers, and many are downright flops, due to the correct user perception that they are low quality for this day and age. $5M dev costs, coupled with advertising budgets and lower per-unit profit (Wii games cost less) mean that, for a low quality Wii game to succeed, it has to sell nearly as much as a HD game. Take these factors into account:
- Advertising costs are the same, given the same grade of advertising. Advertising and marketing cost nearly as much as the dev costs in the last generation (say ~$5M for a $5M game last gen).
- If an average crossplat HD game takes $15M to develop, and lets lowball adverts and marketing at $5M this gen, that's $20M total. According to sources posted by Viper above, the game needs 750K sales to break even, 360+PS3 combined.
If an average Wii game costs $5M and we add the low-balled $5M marketing budget, that's $10M. Also consider that the average profit per Wii game is about 85% of what the average profit per HD unit is, due to lower retail prices. If we use the HD number as a basis, 750K/0.85 = ~882K. Cut that number in half, because we only spent half as much on the Wii game 882/2 = 441K to break even on the Wii alone, not the 250K someone earlier believed it to be.
I'm merely trying to put forth that its not as cut-and-dried as "Wii costs less to develop for, so its a better platform to develop for, with regards to profits". Its not that simple. Development isn't the whole picture, and frankly a large portion of the "costing less" comes from publishers trying to push games of early-last-gen quality onto the user, which further hurts a game's ability to garner sales.
Publishers need to concentrate their money on better/more expensive Wii projects, rather than more/cheap Wii projects, and then, thanks to the Wii's rapidly growing userbase, they will make good profits. The 1/3rd to 1/4th numbers put forth by various publishers are not about efficiency of development on the Wii for worthwhile projects. They are about cutting corners on the Wii, and scramling to tackle the casual market. That's not a good thing.
