Play4Fun said:
Scoobes said:
That article is as bias as they come and completely fails at giving any form of balance. Some of the developers she mentions in this article have actually profited and grown hugely this generation. He talks about Bioware making the most expensive game but that same studio from the start of the gen has grown hugely to the point where it now encompasses 5 teams/studios with nearly 1000 employees and has 3 of the biggest IPs going into next gen. That's all from a single studio in 2005.
It also fails to recognise that studios should actually have an easier time of making games moving into next gen than with PS3/360. The PS4/X1 architectures are effectively PCs meaning far less time (and effectively money) can be spent on engine development and more time spent on the games themselves.
Anyway, have studios closed this gen? Yes, of course, but this happens every generation. Developers and publishers that fail to adapt to the changing market conditions will either go under, or get bought by someone else. That's just business as usual in this industry.
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Rising cost of game development wasn't anywhere as big a problem in other generations as it was this gen so saying "this happens every gen" is disingenuous and ignores the realities of the problem.
Even Ubisoft and Epic were talking about expecting development costs to double or triple next gen.
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precisely. in past generations, even with cost increase, the overall cost was low enough that games could profit with "few" sales. today the costs reached the point where the average game probably needs 500k-1M to break even, and the increase in costs didn't increase the overall sales for games.
it's ironic that nintendo managed to sell more software and thus made more money while keeping costs from 6th gen time.
