NexGen and Innovation

[staticneuron]

What makes you think it will take 20 mill to make a PS3 or 360 game? I just named "THE" best selling and one of the best looking games on the 360 to cost 10 million. This is a view that has no merit. It is hyped up by companies like this http://www.dfcint.com/game_article/july06article.html If I am not mistaken DFC said that the dolphin (gamecube) would completely outsell the competition last generation. Games like Galaxy, MGS4 and Halo 3 will not be a good gauge of the average cost of games. Do people take into account games like geometry wars or flow? Little big planet, Wik and wario smooth moves, really do not look like games that had to push a 10+ million budget to make a game. The argument being used is that it takes this much money to compete but in actuality which games need to compete? Visuals need to compete? I dislike Icon because of its sluggish gameplay and even worse the sheer fact that the new team decided to make the characters look as realistic as possible. Granted it's their style (they made the fight nights) but it is an unwelcome departure from what the series started at. The cost is about developers choice. What throws off these averages is that there are companies that can only afford to make a 1 mill game or a 5 mil game. Then there are companies that can afford 8 to 20 mill and a few that can go even higher than that. When people are talking about competing, the only thing that comes to mind is unit sales. That argument goes out the door because success is relative. If Final Fantasy XII sells 3 million units and small quirky rpg number 12 sells only 350,000, you may not be able to gauge success because FFXII cost 35 mill and small quirky rpg cost 5 mill to make. Granted FFXI gained a greater amount of money but that does not mean that the smaller rpg was not a success. EDIT: "Development of Final Fantasy VII began late in 1995, and required the efforts of more than one hundred artists and programmers using such software as PowerAnimator and Softimage XSI, and a budget of approximately US$45 million" "The game's release in North America was preceded by a massive three month marketing campaign for which Sony allocated a US$100 million budget." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_fantasy_vii "Work on Final Fantasy VII began in early 1996. The development budget for Final Fantasy VII was reported to be a whopping US$45 million. Never before had so much money gone into the making of an RPG. Over a hundred artists worked on producing the most amazing computer graphics ever seen in a video game. Beautifully rendered full-motion video (FMV) sequences were woven directly into the gameplay, and the game played out pretty much like a movie. Pre-rendered backdrops graced the screen throughout the entire game world." http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~geksiong/papers/sts145/Squaresoft%20and%20FF7.htm mistprinted some in second post. I had correct ones in the top post.