| Pristine20 said:
Haze was advertised because it was thought to have "Halo" potential if people only knew about it. I get the feeling that sony did the marketing though so that wouldn't have added to it's cost to Ubi. I don't get the idea that wii games won't need advertising because they are cheaper. IMO, 3rd party wii games don't get advertised so they can stay cheap. Marketing costs tend to rack up quick. The whole CGI stuff is just moot. It's all about manhours and salaries. You don't seem to "get" the root cost of development. Read Shams post, he's a developer and he confirms what I consider the true cost of development in my OP. CGI = more time in. If extra levels were taken out to make time for CGI, it won't necessarily cost more. All that other stuff is technology that the studio already possesses.
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First off, I completely understand where development costs come from ... I was one of the first people (years ago) to suggest the $100,000 per developer per year estimate for development costs due to the salaries, benefits and associated costs with keeping someone employed; although, it can cost more (in some cases $150,000 per developer per year) if the team is in a particularly expensive city, where everything from salaries to office costs can be dramatically higher.
Companies like Epic have kept costs down by offshoring a lot of work to studios in China, where for (less than) 1/4 the cost you can get a similarly talented developer ... In most (successful) cases of offshoring that I have heard of the work that is offshored is the creation of artistic assets that are (primarily) used to populate the environment; for example, you would get your chineese studio to model and texture a trash-can which can then be place in the environment by your level designer.
Now, Haze was a game where (it seems like) the publisher forced the game out the door because development had taken too long and the developer was far over budget. This game was then supported by a marketing budget that seemed to be far larger than any non multi-million selling Ubisoft game (I can think of) and (about) the only reason that I can think of for this was that Ubisoft thought that the only way they could (come close) to break even was to throw enough money into marketing that the game would sell well enough ...
At the same time, there have been a few publishers that defended their lack of marketing for certain Wii games by claiming that the marketing budget is primarily determined by the game's budget ...
There is nothing saying that HD console games have-to cost more than Wii games (or that Wii games have-to cost more than an N64 game), after all they could stick to similar geometric detail and texture detail (with higher resolution models and textures to limit artifacts), with similar texture effects, as games produced for the PS2/Wii and output these games at a higher resolution and it shouldn't cost dramatically more than a Wii game ... Unfortunately, we haven't seen any developer take this approach, potentially because they're afraid that the HD console market really does only care about how a game looks (from a technical perspective)/
