Next-Gen Development Costs

[HappySqurriel]

mrstickball said: I think one of the arguments for this generation will be the use, and optimization of middleware techology. Most of the money goes to building an engine to use, then the rest goes to artists and then programers coding things into the engine.

Even in the PS2/Gamecube/XBox generation most of the money went to artists. The reason why the Unreal 2 engine was so popular on those platforms has less to do with saving money on costs associated to programmers and (way) more to do with ensuring that your artists have mature tools to work with inorder to increase productivity. Note: The tools can either be part of the engine licence, or the engine can just support file formats that are from common tools.

mrstickball said: Gears of War is a prime example. It was made VERY cheaply by a studio that knew how to use an engine. Because of that, they made a game which has made probablly $100m in profit, for a tenth of that.

Well, I suspect that Gears of War may have been produced using a common library of Game Assets being developed by Epic; this library would be used in future Unreal games.

mrstickball said: The huge advantage the Wii has isn't in a better development space, or cheaper devkits (yes, the devkit might be $25k less, but you still have to pay the programers $50k a year to build the game), but in the fact the Wii's horsepower doesn't allow it to require *ON AVERAGE* a whole lot more money, as the textures and graphics will never be to the level of a PS3 or 360 game.

Well, the Wii's advantage is that the lower technical specifications mean that less artistic content (and lower quality content) is produced at a much lower cost to produce the same game.

mrstickball said: Again, if studios can learn to live with valid middleware such as Havok, Unreal, new lighting & shader technology, the average price of a next-gen game could get close (but not quite) rival the Wii dev bugets - whilst having a large graphical edge.

Generally speaking, probably not ... Even if you licence a large library of shader effects your team of artists will still have to add aditional textures to their objects in order to supply these effects with data. Where most of the savings in Next Generation games development will come is from game asset libraries that are produced over multiple game releases; if EA releases a new Medal of Honor game every year by the end of 2010 most of the game assets they would want to produce another game will have already been created.