Development cost this gen and how it could affect gaming.

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torok said:
Personally, I'm no afraid. We see a lot of people here defending simpler games and worse graphics to cut costs down. For me, the day we sacrifice technological advances and innovation to cut costs, is the day I will quit gaming.

We need better graphics, better physics, new gameplay mechanics and so on. The devs needs better tools, SDKs and engines and with that the world will keep going. Of course games are becoming more expensive to develop, but that is the natural evolution. Movies were made by a few hundred thousand at the beginning and now cost hundreds of millions and the film industry isn't going down because of that.

The problem is that AAA games aren't getting as popular as devs would want. Take a look at Kingdoms of Amalur, the game needed to sell 3m units and the game sold 1.51m (according to VGC) let's add 1 more million because of digital sales and possible undertracking. 38 Studios shut down it's doors because of low sales.

Video games are not as popular as movie, and as you can see, game dev cost are staring to match movie budgets.