| Ail said: I hardly think the game you list qualify as budget games :P And your original post in this thread never mentionned budget games in a known franchises... I agree being less dependant on a particular IP is a good idea but you typically do that by trying to develop new successfull IPs and most of the time developing a new IP that will be dureable is a very significant investment, no matter what the target console is ( with marketing costs not negligible at all compared to development costs). And wether we like it or not, one way developers have used to secure IPs and ensure their success is by pouring a lot of money into their development, making sure that the investment necessary to replicate those would discourage the competition ... Why do you think there haven't been more successfull GTA, Wow, FF copies in the market ? Because they cost a fortune to make and part of that cost is there to ensure they are not copied... ( that money isn't wasted but a lot of it is spent on things that really are not core to the game but end up being a differentiator). If you could make FF for a few million bucks, the Japanese market would be flooded by FF look alike ( especially for a serie which resets at every new episode). |
In relation to other Wii (or Nintendo DS) games a Final Fantasy game released on the Wii (or Nintendo DS) would be a fairly large budget production; in relation to what these games cost on the PS3 or XBox 360 a Final Fantasy game for the Wii (and in particular on the Nintendo DS) is a budget game.
Realistically speaking, you have to be conserned with market saturation because if you release too many games of any type for a particular platform the sales of one game will come (entirely) at the expense of another game; so not every developer can focus all of their resources to the Nintendo DS simply because it is the least expensive platform. At the same time, any CEO of a major publisher who is not devoting a large portion of their resources towards the Nintendo DS and Wii (and making these two platforms key components in their long term strategy) should be questioned as to whether their corporate strategy is actually in the best interest of their investors; and any CEO who moves forward with this strategy while they're losing money should be fired.
