Developers see costs double for Durango sequels to Xbox 360 titles

[mrstickball]

JEMC said:

mrstickball said:
Honestly, the solution(s) should be rather simple.

1) Stop making every game in your library a AAA product. The next consoles will focus on on-line distribution more than ever, allowing for more sales of indie-type products with budgets to match. Even major publishers need to look at balancing their portfolios better between the $30 million dollar mega projects and the $1-5 million dollar experimental projects.

2) Use unified engine development across major titles. Its amazing that a company can spend tens of millions of dollars creating a game world, then fail to re-use few assets in any other titles. I know that some of the major companies have their own engines, but it needs to be more extensive. Once they make Grand Theft Auto V, whats stopping them from releasing 2-3 more titles at $15-20 each that re-use a lot of the assets, but are different games overall? (e.g. a racing game, or heck, a quasi-RPG). Look at what Bethesda does with their library - they used the same engine for Oblivion, FO3, and FO:NV with small modifications, and sold well north of 10 million units using the same engine across the games.

Developers and publishers need to see the writing on the wall and realize that the arms race will only lead to more bankruptcies, and look more towards the TV/Movie model of creating a wide range of products for the user base, rather than assume every game must be AAA.

I agree with you but

1) Publishers have the wrong idea that they need AAA games to earn money. To clarify, an Indie developer can launch a game for 20 $ and still gain 5 $ per game. Enough for them to subsist. But publishers need bigger margins (10-15 $) so they need to launch their games at a higher price. But we, the consumers, expect more of a game of a higher priced game and that forces the publisher to launch bigger games that cost more to develop and thus makes them even more pricier. And that's what leads to AAA games.

2) Completely agree. And using your GTA example, Rockstar could use most of the assets of the next GTA V to launch a couple of expansions like Episodes of Liberty City or even develop a new Midnight Club within the city of Los Santos.

1) Why exactly do publishers need bigger margins? Publishers like Paradox and 1C have proven that you can constantly drip out AA titles to the market and make a killing. They made Magicka, Hearts of Iron, and a lot of other sub-AAA games at various price points, most of which have done great. It'd be more profitable in the long run to develop unified engine and technology, and perimate your development teams with the technologies, allowing them to leverage better tech for less cost since there are less 3rd party fees involved.

2) Exactly. The problem I see is that developers aren't seeing their games as worlds and services, but simply as a singular, boxed IP. That is what will kill them - you can't pump $30 million into a game that may sell 200,000 units or 10,000,000 and assume you'll be successful all the time. Look at Dead Rising 2 with Case Zero and Case West - both games were hugely successful in their own right (Case Zero with about 1m sales and Case West at about 300k, but at twice the price) - both using the same engine and tools as DR2 and made at a fraction of the cost.