Vita's sales is now approaching the level of Dreamcast sales.

[Jay520]

HappySqurriel said:

Jay520 said:

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.

Thanks. I thought I was probably wrong about that. I just wanted some justification before assuming his statement was accurate. My main point though, which I'm pretty sure on,  is that the decreasing developers is not the result of expensive porting.