Development cost this gen and how it could affect gaming.

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Well, that's what all of us doomsayers have been saying for years. The rising dev costs are killing the companies. Nothing new here we didn't already know years ago.

What's interesting and, especially, alarming is Vivendi wanting to get rid of Activision-Blizzard. A company that has the biggest money-making machine in the videogames industry ever with WoW. They have Call of Duty; one of the biggest brands in gaming at the moment. In a macroeconomics we currently are, one might expect Vivendi wanting to be holding on to the company in every ways possible.

SvennoJ said:
That 7% marketing slice seems a bit low compared to the top examples.
COD4: 40-50mil production, 200mil marketing
Skyrim: 700 people of which 100 in marketing and 270 voice actors.

But as the hardware gets more powerful, the tools get more standardized and easier to use. More and more work will be automated and results can instantly be checked. There's no reason teams need to keep growing at the pace they have this gen.

There is. And it's because the games need to be released on schedule. If you want to keep your development time as is, you need more people working on them.

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.

That day may be closer than you think. On PC we've seen it happening for a decade already, in the form of games not taking advantage of the specs in general, games being designed console specs in mind and PC games coming to consoles.

If you don't cut costs, you'll end up bankrupted. So, the end result is going to be the same anyway; you're going quit gaming. But for others, like me for example, cutting costs is a much more desirable option.