| elnino334 said: My stance on it is: We don't know how much it is costing these folks to truly make these games. |
No, we don't know how much every game costs. But we have a very good idea -- many games with high production values are reported, and ballparks are often reported. Next gen games are reported to start around 15 million dollars as a production budget, and increase from there. Many short development games cost $20-$40 million this generation. Many developers have stated that they need more than a million units sold to break even.
A million unit seller for the Wii, in most cases, is almost certain to be profitable. Some exceptions to this would be Nintendo first party games like Smash Brothers Brawl and Mario Galaxy, which certainly had very high production costs. Fully orchestrating 300 songs for Smash Brothers alone would have been extremely pricey, and there is so much more in that game than that.
Sure, moving to multiplat doesn't necessarily add a ton of cost, depending on whether it was planned for, etc. But the cost of next gen games is already so high that adding 10% - 20% is a fairly significant additional cost requiring at least 10%-20% additional sales.
And this generation Sony is taking more money than ever before out of each game sold. So is Microsoft, although still less than Sony. This is part of the reason games cost $60: MS and Sony have more expensive hardware to recoup costs for and get profitable with in addition to the higher cost of development.
