Are wii development costs really cheaper?

[Pristine20]

WereKitten said:

@theRepublic

Sure, assets will be cheaper, especially graphic ones.

But if the split was, on PS3, just for example:
40M= 8M code + 25M assets + 1M CGI + 1M motion capture + 0.5M voiceovers + 4.5M marketing

it could become something like
4M code + 6.25M assets + 1M CGI + 1M motion capture + 0.5M voiceovers + 4.5M marketing
=17.25M on Wii

where I have taken half the cost for code (easier hardware, well known tools) and a fourth of the cost for assets (maybe it's even too big of a ratio here).

@jlauro

I assume that the cost of CGI is mainly in the man-hours needed to develop models, scenes, animations and effects, not in the farm rendering of pixels (nowadays setting up a render farm is quite cheap). And if you look at good CGIs on the PS2 (FF, for example), the assets are easily as detailed as the ones used on PS3/360, if only rendered at lower res. If 80% of the cost is in man-hours and 20% is in the rendering then by going 720p->480p you have about half the pixels (2.25 ratio), thus you only save 10%. But really, I doubt it's even that big.

Same with motion capture: I assume the cost is mainly staging the scenes, directing the actors, filming them, not analyzing the data. You will want to put a lot of stickballs anyway, because you don't know exactly how your models are going to be at that point of production.

I think the ratio is too big. The reason I used such a ratio myself in the OP is that I was comparing a game like bloom blox to something like prototype...which is somewhat unfair.

 

@thread

It's nice to see more people getting the point I was trying to make because the way I see it now is that after the original in-house engines have been finalized, additional dev costs on any platform are the choice of the developer because they don't have to best killzone 2's graphics. fanboy mutterings on the internet don't mean diddly-squat.

Looking at things from this perspective, devs have no one to blame but themselves for the fact that they're losing money and it's not because they avoided the wii either.

The issue that may arise regrding ps360 development if devs stop the graphics superiority race is simple: would these "graphically-inferior" games sell? From the evidence available, one would think the answer is no because games like Valkyria Chronicles, The Club etc, haven't moved mountains. The problem now shifts to audience and quality. The audience of an SRPG is pretty small so I don't think VC had a chance to achieve any sort of breakthrough sales. As for something like The Club, it was just a bad game in a genre saturated with high quality titles that people haven't even gotten around to purchasing. (Note that extremely graphics-intensive games aren't guaranteed super sales either)

I personally think the answer is yes but I don't have evidence, outside my own purchase priorities, to back up my claim. I really think that if a game of FFX quality had released on ps360 now as-is, it would still sell millions (this is assuming the original ffx doesn't exist as the new game would be rejected for being a clone if that's the case). The problem devs now have is coming up with fresh ideas that would interest consumers and if they aren't very creative, the time they waste doing that extra brainstorming may end up equaling the cost of making the graphics-intensive clone game from the start. The only difference is that the game would be "lucky" because "brainstorm time" won't be factored into it's cost. Also, these factors don't necessarily favor a switch to wii development because it's also important to note where one's target audience are