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makingmusic476 on 06 October 2010
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naznatips said:
outlawauron said:
naznatips said:

And with 6 years of development time, the cost of HD development, and the cost of a late-development port, it only cost them 3 times as much to make! Yay Square Enix. You can only go up.

PS: I'm actually enjoying the game, now 30 hours in and on Gran Pulse, but it's not incredible. The combat system is great, but still mid-range for an FF game at best, and not near my favorite JRPGs this gen (Namely TWEWY, Lost Odyssey, Yakuza 3).


Come on Naz, with that statement, you're saying that XIII cost $120 million to make which is just preposterous. (FFXII is confirmed to have cost $40 million)

 

I know it cost more, but let's not get too crazy.

Sure, I believe it's possible it cost $120 million. It's easily over $100 million.Consider all the costs to this game:

It spent two years in development on PS2, and got through a full concept and brand new working engine before being scrapped. That alone was probably near $20 million.

It then spent an additional four years in development on PS3, and they went back to scratch on the concept and storyboard. That's crazy. Metal Gear Solid 4 cost $60 million and it was done in two and a half years.

They developed an entire new engine for the game. Then scrapped most of it, and redeveloped it to be a multiplatform engine. Now, you can say it's unfair to count engine development towards the cost, but they're already scrapping this engine after Versus! It's enormously expensive to build a multiplatform engine.

Finally, when development was almost complete, they had to deal with a PS3 to 360 port, which btw is the more expensive direction to port, and delayed release of the game even further compounding the costs many times over.

 

So yeah, FFXIII was probably $120 million. It's easily the most expensive development this generation, and Square Enix has not and never will see one penny for it. That said, it's not nearly the financial disaster Versus is.

MGS4 was announced with an in-game tech demo at TGS05.  It was obviously rather far along at that point, and wasn't released until May 2008.  That implies a dev time well over three years, which makes sense given MGS3's 2004 release date.

Also, the $60 million figure is inaccurate.  It was first posted by some unknown website listing random amounts for "the most expensive games of all time", and KojiPro came out a week or so later claiming the number was inaccurate, and that the game had cost somewhere south of $55 million.

I agree that Final Fantasy XIII probably topped $100 million (I've heard it mentioned alongside GTAIV as the only other game too do so), but I don't think it would've gone much past that.

naznatips said:
Scoobes said:
naznatips said:

 

Finally, when development was almost complete, they had to deal with a PS3 to 360 port, which btw is the more expensive direction to port, and delayed release of the game even further compounding the costs many times over.

You have a source for this? I was sure it was the other way round.


It was in one of those Pachter things on GT the other day, but the explanation is pretty simple. When you're going from many cores to less cores it's much more difficult than less to many. The PS3's design makes it hard to port from it to other systems, which is why for the vast majority of multiplatform games it's been the port console, rather than the primary.


Actually, the reverse is the case.  The ps3 has more cores, yes, but 6 of its 7 usable cores are tiny SPUs that assist the main PPU.  They are much smaller than a typical processor, and can do far less individually than either the Cell's PPU of the Xenos' three PPUs.  Porting from the 360's Xenos to Cell is the more challenging task given you must split large chunks of code across multiple smaller processors.  (Granted, the Cell has overall higher theoretical maximum power, and its unique architecture is what allows first party studios to run things like AA on the CPU instead of the GPU, but these are not really an issue in multiplatform development, where devs are not willing to jump through hoops to max out the hardware they're working on.)

The reason a majority of games up until this point have been ported from 360 to PS3 is because Cell development in general is a pain in the ass, so most developers would just make a game for 360 then toss a shoddy port on ps3 (which is also why numerous older ps3 games have horrible performance compared to their 360 counterparts - attempting to port to ps3 doesn't have pretty results).  The fact that all games were selling 2:1 on 360 at the time gave publishers even more incentive to barely put any effort in to the ps3 version of a game. 

These days we're seeing more and more developers lead on ps3, because they've finally gotten a handle on the system, and it's easier to port from ps3 to 360, thus making the ps3 version of the game better than normal and the port cheaper.  Plus they actually have financial incentive to do so, with ps3 games selling as well or better than their 360 counterparts more often than not these days.  And outside of FXIII, the 360 version rarely suffers for it.

Burnout: Paradise and Devil May Cry 4 were the first notable games to lead on ps3, but in the past year most games have either lead on ps3 (Castlevania, Vanquish, Dead Space 2) or were developed simultaneously for both systems (Call of Duty since CoD4).

Ubisoft is actually focusing on the ps3 as the lead console for all of its upcoming releases for this very reason:

We asked our demoer in each instance why the change from the industry-standard Xbox demonstrations and in each instance, the answer was the same – that development is being led on PS3. One particular demonstrator even went as far as to say that due to the difficulty in converting Xbox and PC to PS3, other developers would “be mad to do things the other way around”.