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

[osed125]

green_sky said:

osed125 said:

Either way the cost of games are increasing waaaay to fast. Like I said in the post above, Dead Space 3 needs to sell 5m units in order to break even (and that's from a full retail price). 

Also take a look a 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 shuts it's doors because of low sales.

So like Otakumegane said in the first post, the "middle" games are going to disappear, it's going to be the big games and the small (indie) games.

I like that article quite a lot but you got to take some of the numbers with skepticism. In the example of Dead Space 3 EA would have done some serious miscalculations if they think that Dead Space 3 would 5 million units without price drop. In fact it most likely won't even get to half that. If $40 out of $60 retail price goes to publisher than 5 million copies implies a budget of $200 million for Dead Space 3. That just seems outrageous even when you include the marketing and other over head costs. 

OT: It is becoming hard to compete with the bigger budget companies. So i guess there might be less risky ventures next generation. I am sure there will be new ip's at the start of the gen but if they'll continue will surely depend on how well they hold up. The indies will continue to get better and better though. Also variable pricing for games should help if used wisely. Not every game has to be $60 bucks on launch day. 

Nintendo will continue to benefit by keeping their budgets low and selling games in high volume. 

Well this is the exact quote from EA: 

EA Labels president Frank Gibeau explains, “In general we’re thinking about how we make this a more broadly appealing franchise, because ultimately you need to get to audience sizes of around five million to really continue to invest in an IP like Dead Space. Anything less than that and it becomes quite difficult financially given how expensive it is to make games and market them.  ”

Maybe he's talking about huge profits of the game, maybe it needs less sales to break even. If it is the former then EA is probably one of the greediest companies out there, if they don't intend to continue support of the franchise because they don't make a huge profit then I don't want anything to do with EA.