Viper1 said:
You have serious doubts but your doubts don't make them facts. Planning and securing funding for Bioshock 2 began while Bioshock 1 was still in development. Incidently, Bioshock 3 is already planned for as well. PoP was most certainly planned for over a year ago. It's using a new cell shaded based engine. Do you know how long that takes to develop itself? As a guide, most sequels to big budget franchises are already planned on before the latest sequel hits the streets. For example, RE6 is already planned for, fuding secured, etc...yet RE5 won't be out until 2009.
No, developers do not. They get paid a fee regardless of how much the game sells (though many publishers do offer incentives for sales milestones and/or average aggregate review scores. You might have been referring to the publishers though. In which case substantialy is still not a valid term. The difference in $50.00 and $60.00 is not much when development cost itself is higher. Consider full price game X sells 5 million on Wii and 5 million on HD consoles. That's $250,000,000 revenue on Wii and $300,000,000 revenue on HD consoles. $50 million extra sounds like a lot but you have to remove at least $20 to $30 million just in extra development costs vs the Wii (could be more soon because I keep hearing about $40 million and higher budgets). Ok, you're still left with a chunk of change but $270 million is not substantially more than $250 million. If you were to look at these numbers from a financial standpoint, wouldn't it make sense to develop for both? If you want to talk substantial difference, try this. $300 million on a $30 million budget or $550 million on a $42 million budget?
Bold part 2. Ail, for Flying Spaghetti Monster's sake, you're on a sales tracking web site. Use it. The term AAA is pointless because we're discussing budget here. Lair - Major bomb. Keep in mind I'm not suggesting they would have made more money on Wi just that you said they don't fail on HS consoles and they most certainly do. Ever notice how many studio closures we've had this gen so far? Or how mnay studios are consolidated and merging? Ask yourself why that is.
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Is any of the titles you listed a big hyped AAA game ? ( ok maybe Lair, but I can't say any of the other was really a big title in which a lot of expectation was put..)
PS : We've had closures and merges but we've had studios expanding greatly too. Overall I don't think the industry as a whole contracted but rather that it expanded...