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BlkPaladin on 17 July 2012
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Sal.Paradise said:
happydolphin said:

@Sal. That makes sense. The issue I had is that I was hearing companies talk about the great cost of HD development, and it was in the higher numbers (figures included but I don't have them on hand). So basically you're saying that these figures shouldn't be as important after the middleware engines took more ground and were built. However, doesn't that still pose a problem for the next gen that requires a new middleware for the newer capabilities? Also, what of the companies that weren't able to tap into the 3rd party engines, or build their own 1st party engines due to unmanageable upfront cost and risk for them?

I'm really not sure how much these engines cost to license, but as before - it's worked out for a ton of games this generation, and now with way more engines on the market their prices should be driven down for licensees. As for small companies, I remember reading that with UE3 at least the inital licensing cost is miniscule, just $100 or something, and they don't take a cut of your earnings until you reach a certain threshold. The rest is speculation on my part though, only time will tell. 

The only engine I know of being $100 is the Torque engine, and that come with restrictions. (You cannot have a game that sells over a certin number of copies) I guess there is a $100 version of it now that I looked it up but that is for a bare bones version of it, and this is for hobbist and indie developers. (Plus you need to give them 25% of your profit) The full version of UE3 are in the ball park of $350,000-to-$1.3million, depending on the target platform and the bell and whistles you want included. (Numbers from Devmaster.net)

 

And to weigh in on the graphic issue. There was an interesting article posted in one of the offical threads that even if there is a big leap in tech we may not notice because most developers are having trouble getting the increased budgets for the increases they are seeing. So we may be seeing fewer companies going for the uber graphics and just doing good enough and focusing on gameplay and just making sure the framerate is stable.