Sega talks about their actual state. Core games at risk

[NJ5]

WereKitten said:

NJ5 said:

Regarding your first point, I think it's widely accepted that development costs have been rising very fast for more than a decade. It's not a problem exclusive to this generation, it just so happens that the costs finally became unbearable during this gen.

As for the second point, think about what would happen if there was only PS3 and 360. No cheaper Wii development to make easier cash on small projects. No expanded userbase captured by the Wii to prop up publishers who are taking advantage of that demographic. I think you're vastly underestimating the consequences of a potential Wii/Wii HD flop.

 

The costs went up because the project size and complexity went up. They had to add more man-hours for artists to draw HD textures, motion capture, more modellers etc. But the project size is not ever-increasing with time.

Take Uncharted 2 vs Uncharted. Do you think the second is going to cost much more than the first? They will have to code less in the engine and tools department. They will have a comparable quantity of assets, and some reciclying will take place. Overall they will most probably have a better profit from the second.

As for the second, not all publishers today are relying on Wii side projects to finance their HD ones. And as I said yet, smaller projects can live as XBL/PSN games and turn good profits if they are good. If they are bad... well, are we really crying for the shovelware now?

 

1- I didn't say costs are ever-increasing when you look at it in such fine detail (i.e. your Uncharted-Uncharted 2 comparison). The general trend has been for increasing costs though, and that isn't just true for this generation. Other people in the thread have put it quite well when they called it an arms race. Complexity and graphical detail keeps increasing at a faster pace than revenue growth allows.

2- Sure not all publishers are relying on profits from the Wii, then again most publishers are losing money whether they do that or not. So something is very wrong in the industry.

Now that EA is losing money (with not so great perspectives to improve AFAIK), they can't even easily purchase more studios to increase consolidation in the industry. When small/medium publishers are going bankrupt and the big ones lose their purchasing power what we see is a hard crash.

At least there's the Activision-Blizzard giant which has the World of Warcraft cash cow... And of course there are some other bright spots, but the big picture of the industry is quite bad.