| Dodece said: @wlakiz I hope you understand that some sources are more credible then others. In this case your using a IGN article from all of seven years ago, and it was the result of a unscientific poll. Which means the information amounted to next to nothing back then, and absolutely nothing today. If you want reviews, previews, and release dates sites like IGN are perfectly fine as sources. If you want deep and thorough analysis however. You should be looking at sources like Ars Technica, or Develop. This shouldn't even be a matter up for debate, but I am sure you are going to try. Anyway I did manage to find one relevant source for your claim. Which was a more reputable site, and at a date far less divorced from today, but it is still three years old at this point. In early January of 2010 Develop said that the cost of a single platform developed game cost an average of ten million dollars, but that doesn't even come with qualifiers attached. It probably means that shovel ware costs are being factored in as well as write off development. http://www.develop-online.net/news/33625/Study-Average-dev-cost-as-high-as-28m However if you want a more realistic overview of game development costs. You should probably use the Wikipedia article, and then you can branch out from their through sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_development How did I reach my figures. Simple I have been paying attention. Every time there is a article on the subject I take some of my precious time and read it. Costs have been going up for quite some time, and I am not just talking about the coders in my development costs. I am using it as a catch all. Which I doubt most are doing anyway. Beyond the coders I am including development kits, platform licensing, software licensing. Marketing both physical, and advertising. Packaging, media, and the retailers cut of the sales price. Even costs that aren't technically development are being factored in there, or did you want a chalk board worth of variables to sift through. As for your last comment I am assuming that people who bought the Vita had some common sense. What are you assuming. They just spent one hundred or two hundred dollars that they didn't need to spend. Only to spend thirty dollars more for every game that they are going to play on the device. I am just assuming that they are reasonably intelligent people who wouldn't want to feel like they got robbed. It was advertised as console gaming on the go, and it kind has to live up to those standards. Otherwise it is just a broken promise. |
Well considering your source didn't actually provide the link to the study, I don't find it having any more credentials than IGN. Until we see how they 'average' it out, I am suspecting that the numbers are highly skewed due to 1 or 2 high cost production.
If you want to play the source game here is another article source about developement cost:
http://www.1up.com/news/3ds-games-cost-millions-develop
comes with a source: http://geimin.net/da/expense.php which you can translate yourself!
In any case, this developement studio only put 3DS development to be $600,000 - $1.8 million USD. Maybe its a regional thing, where japanese studios have a smaller developement budget than american studios but that doesn't change the fact that developers can produce good selling games at low developement cost. In honesty, I don't see Pokemon or mario bros or wii-sport being a 60million dollar production but it garners millions of sales so that makes them AAA games.
Also, I don't know why you are using a 'catch-all' cost in the first place. Administrative cost are often non-static and is based off how much you ship/sell. Thus, I am still calling your 20million dollar cost to be unrealstic. Most game developement studios aren't even 20million dollar companies to begin with.
I feel more ripped off and robbed playing a $60-10 hour-so-called-AAA-FPS game on PS360 than a $40-100+ hour dungeon crawler-rpg. As long as the game provide me with long hours of entertainment, I could care less if it had a $60 million dollar production budget or a $600 000 budget.
