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HappySqurriel on 23 February 2013
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pezus said:
HappySqurriel said:
150 is really not that many at this point in time ...

A large portion of PS3 and XBox 360 games took 3 (or more) years to produce, with the level of graphics people are expecting from the PS4 that will (probably) be the norm for that platform (with big budget games potentially taking 4+ years), and you usually see 200+ games released every year for a platform that has strong third party support.

Essentially, 150 development teams could probably produce 150 games a year for the Nintendo DS, 100 games a year for the Wii/3DS/PSP, 50 to 75 games a year for the PS3/XBox 360/Wii U/PS-Vita, or 25 to 50 games a year for the PS4/'XBox 720' ...

150 is a whole lot more than for other next-gen systems that we know about. And no, most 3rd party games (by far) took 2 years or less to develop. Add in the fact that PS4 is much more dev friendly than PS3 - right from the start, and this is even more impressive. A PS4 game should not take more time to develop than a PS3 game.

Keep in mind that many of these are huge publishers with many development teams, so the actual number of developers and, thus, games being worked on is higher than it appears.

In what fantasy world do you live in?

There has been a steady increase in development team size and development time in games from the dawn of game development, which is the reason we see exponential growth in the cost to develop games ...

Back with the Atari many/most games were produce by 1 to 2 people in 3 to 4 months
With the NES this became 2 to 4 people working for 4 to 6 months
On the SNES this was 4 to 10 peopl working 6 to 9 months
Wth the Playstation/N64 this became 10 to 20 people working 9 to 12 months
With the PS2/Gamecube/XBox/Wii this was regularly 20 to 40 people working 12 to 18 months
And with the PS3 and XBox 360 it has been 40 to 100 people working for 18 to 36 months.

Only the small budget games (or downloadable games) tended to be produced in less than 2 years. Even the games that were released yearly by large studios (Call of Duty) tended to be produced by multiple studios alternating releases, and a large portion of sequels released on 2 year intervals tended to re-use content from previous versions because 2 years is simply too short of a time to produce high quality games with that level of detail.

There are exceptions, but most of these exceptions involved dramatically increasing the size of the team (often) by outsourcing work (often) to cheap chineese studios. Epic Games is well known for this practice, and has bragged about keeping development costs down by having a large portion of their art produced in China.

 

 

This is one of the core reasons why so many studios went bankrupt and/or produced shitty games last generation ...

It is far harder to successfully manage a project that has more people working for longer, and you're far more likely to deliver late with a decline in quality when you try to do this.