| Jazz2K said: I don'T think dev costs will rise up too much in the future just because of engines. When you get all this power you don't need to try and squeeze every bit of power you get because you already get a plenty. Engines will do the tricks but I think that there will be more engines in the future than what's currently available. Crytek and Epic will get competition because using an engine will result in less developping costs then more devs will look into different engines. Avatar graphics imo is possible, it will be mostly about software and programming techniques. |
Back in the days of the NES and SNES the cost of programming a game represented the bulk of the cost to develop a game, today programming is only a very small portion of the cost of development.
The resources required to increase the quantity and quality of graphical assets in games is what has been driving the dramatic increases in the cost to develop games. To understand, back in the N64/Playstation days an artist would need a few days to create a model of a car for a racing game while today it will take multiple artists months to create the "same" asset. On top of this, as you add detail to individual objects in game you have to add more objects and more variety to prevent your environment from looken barren, stale or repetitive. Technology does reduce these costs over time but the savings tend to be significant far after the technology is introduced; for example, there are (probably) huge savings for making a 3DS game at the quality of a PS2/Gamecube game, but only modest savings for making a game that looks like a first generation XBox 360 game.
