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

[osed125]

pezus said:

KungKras said:

pezus said:

KungKras said:
How would that even work?

More power has always meant more cost.

I am confused.

With time and more efficient hardware more power gets cheaper

That's moore's law for hardware.

So far it hasn't applied for software though. Costs have always gone up with every console generation due to the increasing amounts of sophisticated code that needs to be written, increased quantity and complexity of art assets, etc.

Whoops, I forgot to add more efficient game engines.

That won't stop devs for making bigger games which in the end will result in much higher dev cost. Programing and engineering only takes aprox. 20% of the total dev cost. There are also games like Mass Effect and L.A Noire that tried to replicate movies by hiring movie actors to do the voices plus very expensive soundtracks, marketing, etc. Not all dev cost goes directly into simple coding, there are other big factors to take in mind. 

Like some people already said, GTAV is rumored to be $130m+, GTA is an extremely big game but it gives you a glance of how expensive this games are becoming (with some going waaay to high like Star Wars: ToR with a budget of $200m). They might stay roughly the same, but it won't help the greedy publishers and devs to make bigger games which will result in failure. We saw this during the gen with a lot games and some devs and publishers going down.