Project Cafe 3rd Parties

[Viper1]

ImJustBayuum said:

Viper1 said:

ImJustBayuum said:

- I can see a lot of support in terms of old ports and some 3rd party exclusives.

- But not multiplats, 3rd party IMO would develop multiplats for 360/ps3 only

I highly disagree.  Devs/pubs would love to have a 3rd (or 4th if you include PC) platform to amortize costs upon.

Porting would be cheap and quick and the pay off would result in much more revenue even if sales are lower than the other consoles.  I'll show an example below:

Game costs $20 million for the core work across X360/PS3.  Porting to Project Cafe would take a team of 10 about 2-3 months.  That's $80,000 (average salary this year) x 10 = $800,000 / 6 or 4 (prorated for the year) = $133,333 - $200,000.

Publisher gets $20 per unit sold....you'd need to sell just 10,000 units to make it worth the effort.

So you get they are salivating at the idea of another paltform to spread costs across.   Ubisoft has already gone on record stating they will easily be able to port over existing and upcoming HD console IP's to Project Cafe and plan to do so.

I was basically referring to the initial year of Project Cafe and to the majority of new multiplats based on the notion of bigger established userbase..I could be wrong.

Anyhow, there are other costs beside labour that you need to consider (overhead, opportunity costs, production costs, tax , learning curve costs etc). And because we dont really know what these costs are (including labour costs) we simply cannot make up facts like that 10,000 figure you calculated.

Plus, what if that majority of the cafe version is bought by multiconsole owners, that would risk other versions potential sales.

 

Overhead, production, taxes, etc....are the same costs regardless of the consoles your studio supports.  Minimizing the learning curve factor appears to be one of the goals of the console.   Utilizing standards well established on the PC and current HD consoles ensures developers will ease into development rather quickly. 

Also the fact that a lot of the growing pains of the early days of the HD consoles has passed.   Hardware upgrade costs, establishing a larger art department, and other one time costs to enable HD development have already been undertaken so the existence of another HD capable console won't have the same initial financial impact as 2005/2006 did.

Mulitconsole ownership is at best 15% of the market.  You apply the 15% to your projected individual console sales milestones to get your cannibalized sales data.   But you have more to fear from other console titles of the same genre than you do from multiconsole ownership.