the2bears said:
Citations? As a counter argument, regarding costs, consider this: Let's say you make 20 cents on the dollar (all figures are arbitrary). Then, your costs go up from 80% to 81% due to adding motion control. Negligible I know... but profit just went down 5%. Not as negligible. The point is you need to back up your statements with some actual detail.
|
I can't link to an actual cost tree to split up the development resources needed by your average 360/PS3 game, but I don't think we need to go in that detail. Let me spurt rough numbers:
Let's just take the average costs for developing a PS3 and 360 game vs developing a Wii game. If you concede that the HD game is going to cost $15M to $50M, vs $5M to $20M for the Wii game, and if you concede that the cost (=man-hour) difference is mostly due to the asset production then the remaining part of development seems to amount to something like 1/3rd to 1/10th of the overall cost.
This remaining part covers stuff like graphics, AI and physics engine, user interaction etc. Say that you have to add 10% to that slice, you're into 1-3% range of overall cost, and I very much doubt the 3% extreme.
A cost increase of 1-3% is negigible when compared to other factors. That's $300K to $900K on a $30M game, that we can quantify in something like 12500-45000 copies sold (at 20 to 24 dollars per piece).
We're talking about a game costing about as much Gears or Uncharted here, let's say that it aims for 1-2M copies sold. Our extra development will be covered by about 0.6-2.25% of these.
The fluctuations in the profit you get from money exchange, the effectiveness of the marketing, the critical reception are all risk factors that to me seem likely to make this amount irrelevant.
