Squilliam said:
If you're starting out from scratch... Yes. If you have a house engine -> Circa $20-30million, paid for. So then if you go and make Gears of war 2 - They made it in 12months or less. Cheap. Probably $15million or less to make, with a certain level of guarenteed sales. Wii game - You are a large developer so you have to maintain your reputation. You can't release Shovelware and get away with it! So you make a new FPS for the Wii. Cost of engine and design - $15,000,000 or so. Sure you can reuse the engine for a sequel but its a risk even with a large install base. These are big companies you can't just turn around and say "make me some Wii games" It takes time... whilst on the HD consoles the easy money for people like Ubisoft or Insomniac or Bungie is a sequal. If they started development today, it would take probably 18 months to get the first game out the door at least. So I wouldn't count on third party games to come to the Wii at the same rate as the Xbox360/PS3 for at least a year and then I still would doubt it because the combined 360/PS3 market is more compelling than the Wii market. |
Except (of course) that programmers make up the minority of development teams, are inexpensive, and there is middleware and ready-made game engines for all platforms. The expensive part of game development are the artists, which is dramatically more expensive for the HD consoles because the quality and quantity of artistic assets required to produce the same "ammount" of game are dramatically higher on HD consoles.
Using Haze as an example:
Every element in this area has to be modeled and textured, including all of the decorative elements like the structural beams which may not have been created in previous generation games; even if they were in previous generation games they wouldn't be nearly as detailed and there wouldn't be as many beams.
Now as you can see from The Conduit the same level of detail is not there:
The expense of the HD games will not be (dramatically) reduced by improved tools ...
