| outlawauron said: ^ fksumot You kidding right? An Ds title might cost a 1/4 of a PS2 title and Psp 1/2 that of a PS2 game. |
If you were to make very similar games in terms of quality and quantity of content for the PS2 and PSP you would find that their development costs would be roughly equal; the PSP was sold as a portable PS2 and that characterization is fairly accurate, so why would you expect development costs to be different?
On the other hand the DS is fairly close to the N64 in raw processing power, and you would find that developing a similar game on the DS to a N64 game would be similar in development costs.
Now, many people do not remember this but back in the early days of the Dreamcast and PS2 many publishers were complaining about the ballooning cost of videogame development; they were complaining about it costing (roughly) 4 times as much to develop a Dreamcast/PS2 game as it did to produce a Playstation/N64 game.
The reason the four times multiplier keeps showing up in the industry is that when you make a generational jump with 3D graphics the graphical assets tend to require (at least) twice as long to produce, and you need (at least) twice as many in the same area to create a believeable environment; being that the advent of 3D graphics in games is also associated with the number of artists (greatly) outnumbering the number of programmers it becomes clear as to why the increase in artist workload would dramaticaly increase the cost of a project.
