Will next gen end up with far less studios and people developing for it?

[osed125]

Wander_ said:

osed125 said:

Wander_ said:

Do you remember a game by the name Shenmue ? it cost sega 70 million to make it 13 years ago. Now do you think that a game like shenmue now adays would cost that much ? NO. Because development costs decrease every second.

Shenmue was like the Stars Wars: The Old Republic of the time. If you look at the list of games on the thread you will see that all the high budget games come from this gen, with all in the range of $45m+ (and excluding CoD those numbers do not count marketing).

Look at Uncharted 2 possibly the best looking game on consoles and it only cost Sony just $25m. If it came out in 2006 it would've cost them 60m minimum.

That's pure speculation, you don't know if the game would have costed more early in the gen.

The matter of the subject is that developers are scared of the cost. Neil Thompson from Bioware said "You'd have to sell 20-30 million copies before you broke even." http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=153253&page=1

Obviously he's exaggerating but we are going to see games that need 5m units to break even, like Dead Space 3.