Game Development Costs?

[NJ5]

lightbleeder said:
Another question for this thread, how much cost to implement online play to games?
I imagine that some tweaks need to be done to the game to make it online playable so that needs more development time and maintaining the online servers must cost some too...

I say this because there are games like bomberman for wii that won't have online play (yet) and some people are angry about it...

For good online play, the game has to be designed for online play from scratch. Online play is rarely something you can implement as an afterthought, or lag and shitty experience will result. Note that this doesn't mean the single player mode has to suffer or be different due to this, just that it often shares a lot of code with the multiplayer portion. As an example, Quake (the first really good online multiplayer FPS), when ran in single player mode, was still running as Client-Server, with the particularity that the server is running on the same machine and there's just one player on the server.

Having said that, and from what I know, the cost of implementing the online play itself is not that high, a few network programmers and testers are enough. The real cost is implementing and maintaining the infrastructure (servers, customer support, etc), and that cost is higher on the PS3 than the 360. This is because on the 360, Microsoft handles the whole infrastructure for the company (i.e. Xbox Live). On the PS3, I believe each developer is responsible for implementing their own servers, which means they can either absorb those costs or charge their customers for them. I'm not sure how it works on the Wii because I haven't seen any reference to that.