What Nintendo's Rift with the Hardcore Means for the Industry

[HappySqurriel]

Renar said:

the2bears said:

Ail said:

the2bears said:
How come no one ever blames the HD consoles for raising game budgets to unsustainable levels? A couple generations ago there was far more to gaming than FPS and cinematic experiences. Now, however, some people seem to think that's what's owed to them? I'll happily continue to have fun with my Wii, thank-you.

Unsustainable level ?

Seems to me the only gaming companies that are having problems are those that put out really shitties games. Most of the gaming companies that produced decent games are doing fine...

Stop blaming HD-consoles for killing the industry when the financials numbers quarter over quarter show that it has never been in better shape as now....( every segment, be it the Wii, the HD-consoles, the old PS2 or the PC is doing better than expected in term of sales).

 

So, average game budgets have quadrupled, while the the price of a game has gone up from $50 to $60. You figure it out. Better than ever? Revenue means little if profits aren't there. Higher budgets, more risk... so yes, unsustainable.

I'm doubtful that the average game budget has quadrupled.  But say it has doubled plus.  If average sales of a game has double as well, with the price going up by 20%, the industry would be fine.  Now, has the average game's sales doubled since last time?  I'm doubting that as well.  So, in the final analysis, unfortunately, I'd have to say yes, unsustainable as well.

 

 

For the most part people have been stating that development on HD console (and modern PC) games is 2 to 4 times what it cost to produce a similar game in the previous generation, and at the same time we have seen a massive reduction in the ammount of content that the average game has. This is (generally) backed up by post-mortums that are released to sites like Gamasutra.com that show a noticeable increase in development team size (from, roughly,40 people in the previous generation to, often, over 100 people for HD games) and in the time it takes to develop a game (from 18 to 24 months to, often, over 36 months to produce a HD game)

Some games are selling more copies, but that comes at the same time as there are (dramatically) fewer games in most genres, and even the higher retail cost is not preventing most large publishers from recording massive losses; even the massive quantity of highly profitable DS games that these companies are selling do not recover most of their losses from HD game development.