NexGen and Innovation

[HappySqurriel]

staticneuron said: 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.

You can define it as ambition but the truth is it is heavily related to people's expectations ... You could make a platformer that looked exactly like Super Mario Galaxy on the PS3 but it would probably sell poorly because the graphics do not meet people's expectations for a PS3 game; to get decent sales you have to increase the quality and quantity of graphical assets which increases development costs. Now, many of the graphical effects I could list that are driving up costs were used in the previous generation but there is a difference; in the previous generation you'd use these effects on a small subset of your assets (because of lack of graphical 'horse power') whereas on the PS3/XBox 360 these effects are being used on everything. Now, ultimately it doesn't matter why people like THQ and EA are estimating that PS3 and XBox 360 development costs are 2 to 4 times as high as development costs for the Wii; all that matters is that the development costs are dramatically higher.