Wii software drought. Perfect time to open software studio's

[Zlejedi]

gumby_trucker said:

Zlejedi said:

Let me ask you - have you thought about this?

Do you think that space in magazines will get cheaper magically because you are making game with PS2 class tech instead of PS3 ? Or will you get TV discount for advertising smaller game ?

Just because you can make game for 10 milions less doesn't mean much when the cost split is 20 milions development and 50 milions advertising.

1) Luckily for us we have wonderful inventions like the Internet and steam that are eliminating the problem of limited magazine space or broadcasting time-slots. In the age of the Internet the bottleneck has now moved to transparency of these huge amounts of information. Which leads me to:

2) Transparency is indeed a real issue, not only faced by games might I add. This is exactly the kind of thing platform holders and big publishers should be investing their money in! This is something that directly leads to more happy customers, which leads to more happy developers, which grows the industry!

A good example of this is Apple, actually. I don't have an iphone, but I remember last year during one of their keynotes they introduced a new feature of iOS called "iAdds" that essentially gave you a playable demo of an app on the side instead of an annoying flash banner when you browse the web. You could instantly try it out, in real time, and these adds could be context sensitive and dynamic just like google addwords are today. I don't know if they came through on that, but it seemed to me to be a big step in the right direction.

Ad1. I was talking about magazines as a journals or newspapers not storage space - perhaps I should have used diffrent word. 

But my main point was that development costs are only a part of equation and sometimes marketing costs can be several points higher than AAA game development.