| Munkeh111 said: Why shouldn't we care, that's the actual budget for the game. It's not about the huge institutions, it's about the management of the team Well the games that the PS3 produced were great, other than from Japan (Lost Odyssey is my "Japanese game of the generation"). My point was that if it has been more powerful it really could have moved gaming further forward than the 360, but few people truly took advantage of it and let the 360 be the lead console, then do terrible ports Once you work out how to develop for a console, the next game becomes easier. With Sony's name, the PS3 was always going to do well and if they were sensible, they'd know that the best thing to help it along in Japan would be Japanese games. But Square Enix, for example, just couldn't work this out and managed to release 3 jRPGs which weren't great... and all featured recyled content from the previous game. The best (non-Eidos) Square Enix games for PS3 are without a doubt Kingdom Hearts HD I.5 & II.5 and Final Fantasy X HD. Just imagine if we'd got anything like X, X-2, XII, KH I, KH II. But we got XIII, XIII-2, Lightning Returns. They needed to make that first investment to increase the user base and help them work out how to make next-gen games. They just did a really bad job of it. I'm focusing on Square Enix, but the others are just as culpable |
20 million is a huge budget, though. Take a look at EAD's budgets, tiny by comparison, and you expect a third party dev of a small studio to keep up with ND's 20 million? That's a huge sum of money and would require huge sell through for the studio to return to profit after you cut off all the publisher, console dev kit and royalty, and store front fees. Uncharted 1 and 2 could fit under that umbrella because the engine was built under the weight of the first with the funding of Sony to back it up, the second being noticably cheaper to produce as one juge price point is cut off. A normal, small third party AA studio isn't going to muster the millions out of nowhere just to get the first game out... especially not for a limited genre like jRPG.
The problem really is in the detail of getting that first game out and not tanking because of it; which is exactly what didn't happen. Games just became unaffordable to make for the smaller AA studios, and everything went AAA or bust (or small indie), or went to handhelds where budgets were much more manageable and not on some arcane architecture. So, while I agree that once a game is made and the system set you would produce more easily long term, a lot of that "first" never came. Just look at all the problems Atlus has had...
(Also you forgot that shitty Star Ocean game we got...)
