Next-Gen Development Costs

[Li Mu Bai]

Kwaad said: a 10million dollar game sold 2.5million copies, next gen graphics, for 60$ a 12.5million dollar game sold 340,000 copies, last gen graphics, for 50$ Next gen games are not that expensive... compared to last gen. Like Shane said, The sky is the limit. The most expensive part on a game is the graphics/audio/fluff. The core program/programming/etc is cheaper than the graphics/audio/fluff. An example is motorstorm. The textures are photographic textures. (actually taken from a HD video camera) Games like Red Steel, the textures have to be hand-tweaked to make sure they look right, becuase if their not, they wont look as good. The PS3/360 has the advantage they can just take a high rez texture, put it on the screen and it looks great. The Wii, every texture needs to be optimized, Every character model needs to have the lowest number of polygons and still look good. The PS3/360 can go the brute force approach, wich is usually cheaper than the finess way. The Wii can do brute-force, but not much better than a x-box. I'd go with PS3 dev costs will be around 20-30mil (2010) And the 360 being right there next to it. I would say the Wii would be costing in the area of 100,000-20mil. (this is not counting the extreme high cost games) However as was mentioned earlier. the 20mil PS3 game, can be ported to the 360 in a few hundred thousand. So multi platform games would cost half that for PS3/360, while the Wii would be the same, as it would require a complete game to be made for it. Thus making a Wii more expensive to make a multi platform game for. Phew got long winded there.

Sorry Kwaad, you're completely wrong here. A large portion of Red Steel's development cost was due to extensive R&D with a completely new control system, Wii's FHC. Its complexity in translating movements, (some much better in swordfighting than others, such as blocking & overhead thrusts. struggles in aiming & movement, going through numerous control schemes, etc.) as most of the game's actual level design, engine, & graphics subsystem were done on GC development kits. When the early Wii kits were finalized Ubi took advantage of the extra ram for textures, lighting, & a very few post processing effects. But at its heart, it was still simply a window dressed Gamecube game. Full documentation of Hollywood's abilities weren't even available at that time, nor were middleware tools such as AILive, nor the soon to be released within the updated Wii's SDK, Nintendoware. So Ubi was starting from scratch w/the control scheme essentially, (in addition to they had never developed even an "exclusive" GC engine) & a Red Steel sequel is already in the preliminary planning stages. My source? A Ubi-Soft programmer. Compairing the two is foolish, Epic operating off of an engine they had developed & optimized (one of the most expensive aspects of software development) & simply built the requisite assets around it. An 8hr. single-player game with a heavy emphasis on the multi-player component. (still an excellent game mind you, I'm not being critical) Yes, next-gen gaming in HD *is* quite expensive, much moreso than the last generation.