Jay520 said:
I'd like to see some evidence for the bolded. People say this a lot but then their sole justification seems to be an occasional developer that shuts down. Even if it is true, mere correlation does not imply causation. While third parties may be doing worse financially this generation, that's not the result of developers losing money on ports. It is the result of development costs increasing due to more powerful, complicated, and time-consuming hardware coupled with increased demand for more technically stunning games as stronger hardware allows for it.. This is not connected to developers porting games In fact, I'd argue that porting games to multiple platforms has been beneficial to 3rd parties. The PS3 and the X360, for example, form a super installbase due to their sharp similarities. This results in a much higher potential for sales than in past generations. Let's compare the success of 3rd parties with super installbase of the PS3 and X360 of this generation versus the sole installbase of the most dominating home console ever - the PS2.
A few notes about this chart
As you can see, porting to multiple consoles actually benefits 3rd parties as it increases the sales potential of the games. When you refer to how "so many gaming companies have been struggling" (which I don't think is much worse than last generation), that is the result of higher development cost because of expensive hardware & futher emphasis on technical prowess, not losing money on ports. Any money used for ports is countered multiple times over by the increased sales from that port. |
Each generation has left us with fewer and fewer developers because the increased costs to develop games has increased the sales needed to break even ...
The cost of porting games across platforms is a relatively small portion of the cost of developing games though. By licensing a game engine from a company like Epic you will (most likely) get pretty decent performance out of the box for the PC, XBox 360 and PS3 and (at worst) you would need an additional programmer throughout the life of the project to support all three platforms (for a rough cost of $300,000). In contrast, to develop games with graphics at the level of the XBox 360/PS3 ended up increasing costs on developers by 2 to 4 times; and this translated into an increase in development cost on average games of $10,000,000 to $15,000,000.
