NexGen and Innovation

[staticneuron]

HappySqurriel said: The real issues are that in order to make more realistic looking surfaces in games you’re required to use a lot of advanced shaders which usually require another texture (with data related to the shader) being applied to a model; as an example, to create normal maps on models it is not uncommon to produce a super high detailed version of the model and map the normals back onto the lower detailed model (essentially, doubling or tripling the amount of time to create one model). At the same time, the more detailed your models become the more detailed people expect the environment to be; this means that you now have to create all sorts of extra game assets in order to populate the environment. Ultimately, this is what people mean when they say that it is 3 to 4 times as expensive to make a HD game on the PS3 or XBox 360 as compared to a SD game on the Wii ...

And normal mapping was used on the Xbox and PC's years ago. Halo 2 and Riddick had normal mapping. Games like gears of war cost epic 10 million. Final fantasy X cost 32 million, FFXII cost 35 and FFVII cost around 45 million. Lost planet 20 million. It is rumored that killzone for the PS3 has a 22 million budget. I do not see any real evidence that proves that this generation or HD is more expensive. It seems that the cost is more related to ambition than the content itself.