Are wii development costs really cheaper?

[mike_intellivision]

Kasz216 said:

darconi said:
@Esa-Petteri

Are you purposely being obtuse or do you really not know what a game engine is and what it does?

A large, extremely high end HD engine like Unreal 3 is a hell of a lot more difficult, time consuming, and expensive to develop than a SD engine.

Its common practice for engine developers to create essentially a glorified game/depo to showcase their engines under the idea that demonstrating it works a lot better for marketing it than putting out a brochure. This same reason why is Crytek developed Crysis, it was to showcase and market the Crytek engine. The money they make from selling the game is just the bonus.

Thats why they advertised it was only 10 mil, because they are saying to their prospective clients to "BUY THIS ENGINE AND ONLY SPEND 10 MIL!". A lot of the costs of KZ2 also went into making the engine.

Epic likely made more money from licensing the Unreal engine than they did from selling GeOW (though reusing the engine for GeOW2 and likely GeOW3 would increase those profits).

In any case, you all forgot the costs of creating high definition assets. Go search in my post history, there's a link to polyphony stating that the time it takes to render a car model for GT went from ~couple of weeks in PS2 to ~6 months per car on the PS3. That is where all your extra time and money went.

Likely nothing.  They make something like 1 Million a liscense i hear.  I think like over 100 games have liscensed the thing.

 

There does not appear to be any publicly available info on the pricing for the Unreal 3 engine.

The Unreal 2 engine was 350k plus 50k per additional platform plus a 3% royalty based on wholesale price/sales.

So if a game wholesales for $30, that is 900k revenue per 1M sales.

 

Using a $40 wholesale price for GoW, that is $5.7M in royalties that an external developer would owe Epic -- plus whatever the licensing fee would be (at least $350,000 -- maybe 2x-3x). 

What this means is the actual comparable cost of developing Gears of War is $16M-$17M.  Much closer to the $20M people talked about. And it means a high-end Wii game is only 62.5% the cost of a high-end, budget-protected Xbox 360 game.

 

Mike from Morgantown