Intrinsic said:
Unfortunately, this is completely true. Though its not their fault. HD level games just cost a lot to make. In the PS2/PS1 era, a game like FF7/8/9/10 could cost anywhere between $3-$15M to make. In the HD era, you just need a lot more developers working on your game. And these developers cost more these days because of the demand for great talent. So now we look at an annual development budget of anything between $20-$30M per year of development. Thats a lot for HD level RPGs that typically take well over 3 years to make. A jap dev making a game will thus be looking at spending anywhere between $40M-$90M for a game that take around 2-3yrs to make. To break even they would need to sell at least 3-4M copies of that game. Thats a very scary prospect for any japan centric developer and hence the westernization of most games. This is why SQEX will make a push for Tomb raider and dues ex cause not only are those 2yrcycle games, they appeal to the western audience and can at least gurantee them around 4-6M in sales. |
Uhhh wat? Research was conducted last gen and the average development cost for a game was $23m with certain higher budget games going into $60m. So to break even for an average HD game you would have to sell $383k copies.
What happened with Tomb Raider was a rare occurance of SE being poor with budget management.
