NexGen and Innovation

[HappySqurriel]

staticneuron said: 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.

What makes me think it will cost that much ... first off:

According to the The french publisher and developer, the development costs for the highly anticipated first person shooter will be approximately $12.75 million. Now that might sound like a lot of money for most of you, and it sure is, but if you compare it to the costs for a Xbox 360 or Playstation game it isn't much at all. In fact, Ubisoft have stated that developing games for Sony or Microsoft's consoles could cost three to four times more http://www.nintendolife.com/articles/2006/08/12/red_steel_development_costs

I also worked as a game developer from 2000 (in my second year in college) until 2003 ... Our projects were on the Playstation and GBA and involved teams of 12 to 14 people and a timeline of 12 months ... The budget was $1.5 Million and these games were not particularly impressive. Knowing how many people were required for rudimentary Playstion 3D graphics, the number of people that would be required to move to a PS2 project and how detailed the PS3/XBox 360's graphics are I couldn't see how they could be developed for less than $10 Million.