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HappySqurriel on 05 February 2009
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jammy2211 said:
HappySqurriel said:
jammy2211 said:
Are people seriously saying that ambition has no correlation to costs?

To draw up a quick comparison, take a game like Burnout Paradise. It has a vast, open racing world. Furthermore it has seamless online intergration that can be accessed without any hassle at the click of a button, great physics etc. It's clearly a cut above most of what EA have procuded on the Wii. Then you look at stuff like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge, Battlefield: Bad Company, with voice acting, open worlds, just ambition in general. When you're trying to make a game like this, it's going to cost more, of course it is.

IT's no surprise to me that a game like Boom Blox or EA Party of MySims or NERF-Strike cost a third of the price to produce, aside from graphics there's still alot of things they're doing to cut costs.

I'm by no means saying that HD assets and graphics arn't upping the costs, but when you're comparing Boom Blox and NERF-Strike to Dead Space and Burnout Paradise, no matter what system you put them on the latter are going to cost more.

How "ambitious" a game is, is directly related to how much a game costs and you could consider the visual improvement that goes along with HD game development to be an increase in "ambition" of the project ...

Basically, suppose that MySims cost $2 to $4 Million to develop for the Wii. To take full advantage of the graphical capabilities of the HD consoles and produce a similar game would (probably) boost the cost of development to somewhere between $6 and $12 Million. At the same time a more "Ambitious" game like Grand Theft Auto built from the ground up for the Wii would probably cost $10 to $20 Million to develop, and similar projects on the HD consoles are hitting $40 to (over) $100 Million to develop.

 

 And where did you pull those 'figures' from, a legitimate and reliable source? OR your arse?

 All I'm saying is even if you ignore the additional cost of graphics, and just look at what the games is trying to acheive from a gameplay / scope stand-point, you'd expect it to cost more. At the end of the day, creating a game where you throw a ball at some blocks doesn't cost as much as a huge open world racing sim with seamlessly intergrated online. Ignore graphics and you'd still be looking at more costs.

 Most Wii games, 'average' Wii games, are cheap because they're cheap games. Sure enough if they tried to make a GTA or MGS on the Wii it'd still cost less then HD consoles, but one third the cost? I doubt it.

 

 

Why is it so hard to believe ... Look at a post I made earlier in this thread:

 

HappySqurriel said:

@Groucho

Lets compare apples to apples ... Ratchet and Clank took Insomniac 40 developers 18 months to develop (a feat you said was the sign of shovelware in a previous thread) and Ratchet and Clank Future took insomniac 70 full time developers, 30 shared developers, and 25 contractors 23 months to complete.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2842/postmortem_insomniac_games_.php?page=3
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3889/postmortem_insomniacs_ratchet__.php?page=4

You seem to be the only person in the entire videogame industry to think that there has not been an explosion in development costs from the previous generation to the current generation.

 

40 developers working for 18 months works out to 60 man-years of labour ... 70 developers working for 23 months works out to 134 man years, and if you assume the shared resources were split 50/50 with another project that's another 28 man years, and if the contractors only averaged a year of work that would total over 180 man years of labour.

In a previous thread I showed that Factor 5 spent $3.5 Million developing Starwars Rogue Squadren 2 and I've heard several times that Lair was well over $20 Million in development costs. While Lair may be a more "Ambitious" product than Starwars Rogue Squadren 2, I don't think you can argue that it was so much more "Ambitious" that over 6 times as much work went into everything except for visual elements.

Why is it that when every major publisher and developer in the world points out that far more work goes into producing similar games on the HD consoles than on the Wii console so many people who have never written a line of code, or produce a single texture or 3D model, claim that they simply can't believe it?