What sales level is needed for PS3 devs?

[NJ5]

Bodhesatva said:

Entroper said:

NJ5 said:

Interesting. Even more interesting questions are:

- what level of PS3 sales is required for exclusives to be financially workable? How many PS3 exclusive games have made a profit?
- in multi-plat games, what is required for most devs to give a damn about the PS3 versions, instead of launching defective software with framerate drops and other problems?

Indeed, the one thing missing in the OP is the budget required to do more than a half-assed port. 10-15% gets you bugs, framerate issues, etc. How much did the developers spend who wrote two versions of the game from the ground up?

That's another issue entirely, and I would assume from a financial standpoint, this effectively amounts to two exclusives.

I'd expect the only real savings would be in conceptual design, which is probably a fair amount, but I doubt it's the core cost. I'd put it at (At least?) 60-70 percent of an actual exclusive, but I'm frankly talking completely out my ass, which is why I didn't make a thread about these issues. I have no financial basis on which to ground such estimations.

Again guys, the point here isn't to say that companies shoudl make PS3 exclusives. I doubt that's the right choice, but it would be a whole separate group of calculations. The essential question was: should developers abandon the PS3 the way they did the Gamecube? And the answer is no.

I'm sure that more than the conceptual design can be shared between the two versions. Many of the graphical assets and level design can be used with little to no changes (other than file format conversion in some cases) between the PS3 and 360. That's a big part of the cost of a game. Some of the game engine code can surely be shared with little to no change too, depending on what programming environment was being used.

But clearly, many developers are spending too little on the PS3 versions of their multiplat games, and I think that's what Entroper was talking about.