Take Two: PS4 And Xbox 720 Game Development Costs To Be Similar To Current Gen Consoles

[JEMC]

torok said:

JEMC said:
Well, given that GTA V is rumored to cost +130$ mil, I'll take whatever he says with a pinch of salt.

Well, GTA 4 was US$ 100 mil and it looked like a PS2 game in HD and had a world considerably smaller than San Andreas. GTA 5 has much better graphics and will have a world bigger tha San Andreas (and that is really large, it was even bigger than Skyrim). So a 30% increase in costs if we consider the massive improvement doesn't looks to be a problem.

GTA 4 was a lot of things, but "a PS2 game in HD" was not one of them, and an increase of 30% in dev costs during one gen is huge.

The difference (if we asume that from the 60$ that cost a game, 10 go to the store, another 10 to MSoft/Ninty/Sony and the other 40 to the publisher) is that you go from selling 2mil games when the budget is 100mil to 3.3millions.

Sure, for games like GTA, CoD, etc. those sales are easy, but for those games that cost 20mil and need to sell 500k to break even, a 30% increase means selling 650k just to not lose money. Yes, the games will look prettier, but how many will sell enough?