Analyst: Wii Is 'Fool's Gold' For Game Investors

[famousringo]

Procrastinato said:

famousringo said:

Well, I expect CoD: WaW would be pretty cheap if you consider the content to be paid for by the HD development (it gets messy if you want to divvy up the content costs on a multiplatform release). I'm sure it cost something to downscale the textures and port the engine, but I doubt they spent too much on that, since the engine doesn't make much use of the Wii's TEV and the online is less robust than some other Wii games. Ditto for Tomb Raider, except the Crystal engine was already established on Wii for Tomb Raider Anniversary.

All I know about the Conduit's cost is that their dev team was around 30 people a few months ago and their dev cycle is about 18 months. The team size probably peaked highe r at some point, so it's hard to know how much labour actually went into The Conduit. Doesn't sound too pricey compared to triple-digit teams working on a dev cycle 50-100% larger, though.

How is the The Conduit's dev cycle only 18 months, when we've had screenshots for it, for about that amount of time?  Usually screenshots don't start happening until near Alpha, and by then a project is about 3/4ths complete.  You guys are really throwing out some confusing numbers here.

 

 

They've stated in interviews that the concept came to them in October 2007 when they wished they could play Halo 3 with Metroid Prime 3 controls, so the game might be closer to 20 months of work now that they have a firm release date. The first images were released in April 2008 on IGN as seen here. That's 12 months ago.

All these facts are gleaned from various interviews. I'm sorry you find them confusing. I'd offer to track down the particular interview for each fact if these guys didn't give out so damn many interviews. :P

Edit: I found it anyway. This one has most of the relevant facts we're discussing. It's from Sept. 2008 and he states they are content complete and nearing alpha:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20130