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HappySqurriel on 28 July 2008
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ssj12 said:
HappySqurriel said:

If I was investing in EA the questions I would like to ask is:

How can you say that this is the only generation where the second and third place consoles are still meaningful? When you account for the difference in development costs there is currently (and probably always will be) far more risk involved in producing a HD game than there was to produce a Gamecube/XBox game or a N64 game.

How long can the HD consoles remain meaningful for? There is a significant risk (for the HD consoles) that the Wii will reach a tipping point (caused by increased third party support) where the Wii can pass 50% or 60% of total market share. Hypothetically speaking, can you really justify spending 2 to 4 times as much to develop a HD game if there is 1.5 (or more) Wii systems on the market for every HD console on the market?

 

dev costs are lowering and development times are going to shrink. Once engines are made there is only upgrades needed for future titles. An engine can take years to make but once your in the upgrade part it can take a month to upgrade and half the programmers.

Resistance 1 was in development for a bit over 2 years now Insomniac has produced Resistance 2 in about 2 and Ratchet a year. They are going to have the PSN Ratchet out in the summer less then a year after R&CF was released with improved graphics and gameplay.

Using Insomniac as an example there is zero reason for why any developer would turn away from either HD console. Developers who have to make a new engine for each game are the ones who suffer but the ones who just upgrade the engine, like Epic Games, see cheaper development costs and quicker development time or more time to focus on the game being made.

In the end there is the pay off. HD console games cost $10 then the Wii's due to the development costs being more but in the end after making back development costs profit flows in faster and in larger amounts.

In the Playstation/N64 generation there was an interesting thing which occured that people were not expecting ... The number of people needed to generate content exceeded (by quite a large margin) the number of people involved in producing software for the first time ever.

Durring the PS2/XBox/Gamecube generation even when you included the scripters into the people who were involved in producing software, the number of Artists and Level Designers easily outnumbered those involved in software 3 to 1.

With most game engines being licenced, and the number and complexity of scripts needed for a game not dramatically growing (in part because of physics engines) the majority of growth in expense of HD games has been the cost to produce high quality 3D assets; when you're talking about a signle character model taking 3 to 4 people a month to 6 weeks to complete the ammount of money saved from having an existing engine is tiny and unnoticeable.