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Forums - Gaming Discussion - I Do Not See How Development Costs Can Possibly Go Up This Gen

You guys talk as if development costs are going through the roof and game companies will close their doors. I do not believe this is true!

It seems for the most part game costs are going to stay the same as they are now.

Devs do not really need to make new engines they are simply tweaking old engines and running them at a more stable frame rate and better resolution. Most games last gen were downgraded in order to be on consoles (Gears 3/GTA5 etc.). So having games on current gen consoles will not have an increase in cost at all!

Look at Titanfall and Infamous Second Son - They basically are last gen games with a better frame rate and resolution. Do you guys actually think that these games cost millions more than the 360 version of titanfall/infamous 2? No way!

Not to mention indies are on the rise and these games are cheap as hell to make. It seems like the AVERAGE cost of games is actually declining. More and more companies are taking advantage of DLC as well, devs are doing just fine for themself!

Sure the Wii U is havinbg trouble making money for 3rd part devs, but that is not to say that the PS4 and Xbox One will not more than make up for that lost profit!

PSVita and 3DS are not nearly as popular as their earlier counterpart all that money is being made in tablets and smartphones.

Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo are paying heavely for exclusives. Devs are doing better now more than ever. The only reason people get layed off is if they have no talent or they cannot adjust to the market



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Hmm. this seems like a logical stream of though but engines are going to be advanced as long as they think gamers want prettier graphics. A lot of the cost of games comes from marketing and the bloat. The western game industry needs a lot more devs to be more streamlined and focused. And yes the XB1 version of Tianfall costs millions more than the 360 version as the 360 version was a port. Development costs are probably going to go down with the new pricing models for Unreal and Cryengine though



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Pachter said costs had not gone up for the 8th gen.



Not going up. They will get even a bit lower than last gen.



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Development cost won't go up, but Budgets will, and after a set of screw ups, they will go down with a couple of companies becoming stronger and a couple of companies becoming weaker.



 

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Assuming people stop wanting prettier, bigger, and more complex games, I don't see why they would go up at all.



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The same amount of effort will be put into getting the best graphics this gen compared to the best graphics last gen, except this gen the consoles are easier to develop for so costs will go down.



Yep, and with both consoles using x86+GCN, even with different APIs, the costs will tumble a bit. Considering that basically all dev hardware is PC hardware, it will be more streamlined than ever before.

Also, there is enough extra room in ram/drive space/etc that massive effort to compress/edit/tweak things into the limited resources will be much less of an issue than PS360. PS360 gen was hamstrung by low memory space even for the time.

On PC terms :

PS3 was an exotic high end CPU, high end GPU, and high end RAM, but tragically limited by a tiny amount of memory.

360 was an exotic high end CPU, bleeding edge GPU, and midrange RAM (+ bleeding edge eDRAM), but tragically limited by a tiny amount of memory.

If the PS360 had been given 1GB of dedicated OS/System/Game memory, and 1GB of dedicated high-speed video memory (not interrupted/shared with the general software) they would have been stunningly superior to what they were. 2GB of RAM wasn't unheard of at that time either. It appears that they've learned from that timeframe though, with 8GB today being a fairly high-end number.



People want bigger, prettier, more lavish games with far more features. It is the army of artists that pushes up the cost, to create all the high-def art assets, but that is not the only thing: more MP modes, more online features, more companion apps, and above all, more marketing will push the cost ever higher, as the industry is saying.

The list of downsized/closed top-tier developers is very, very long. Saying it is just people with no talent is arrogant in my opinion: surely no-one here says that Irrational, Criterion or Sony Santa Monica (just to give few examples) are talentless? And yet top-tier developers are being closed/downsized too.



You may be correct, but only because costs continued to rise over the course of last gen. When 7th gen started, the threshold for success was typically around 1 million units. By the end, we saw a lot of publishers disappointed if their title couldn't clear 5 million units.

And this is while publishers worked to leverage their established engines and took increased advantage of DLC as a tool to increase revenue.



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