Ubisoft CEO: Average next-gen game will cost $60 million

[mrstickball]

ssj12 said:

mrstickball said:
If next-gen games cost $60 million to produce, then I think that every company needs to take a step back and look into cost-cutting solutions such as ensuring they are using as much automation via engines as possible.

I mean, you look at companies like Epic and Capcom that reuse their engines multiple times (UE3 and MT 2.0) and create some glorious games on the cheap, then you have others that do one-offs like Rockstar's GTAIV (which they did do 2 episodes, but the fact is that isn't really enough to justify such a ghastly $100m budget) or MGSIV.

Ultimately, the issue is that companies are still using semi-archaic means of game development - making one-off engines for games, which is a waste of resources at this point in time. Gears of War was made for 1/4th the cost of Killzone 2 or MGSIV, yet sold more...All because the developers knew their in-house engine well.

Given time, I think devs will either die out because of their stupidity in making games (the fact is, not every game can be a AAA blockbuster) or evolve into the movie studio mentality of publishing multiple tiers of games - indies, medium-cost games, and the occasional blockbuster.

PC development is already like that. Its just that some studios became stupid and reverted to the "must make AAA titles always for consoles" mentality. Lucky indie development will never die and continue bring out amazing games for the PC.

Correct. I think what happened was that we saw a large number of games hitting blockbuster status in terms of units sold (>3,000,000 or more), and companies got greedy, assuming that such a level could be sustained indefinately. When they adopoted that mentality, they comitted themselves to ever-increasing costs. This is why so few blockbuster PC games exist. Console games do have the advantage of multi-platform which is a great help, but there's no sense in making a failure multi-plat, because it'll still be a failure.

Eventually, console developers will change. There's already an undercurrent to serve such creative outlets thanks to XBLA, WiiWare and PSN, where the cost to develop a top-tier game is 1/50th that of a blockbuster console game...Yet the revenue payouts far exceed that 1/50 ratio due to developers circumventing others taking money from their product (70% of revenue goes to developers on most downloadable formats versus 40-60% going to retail developers)