NexGen and Innovation

[HappySqurriel]

staticneuron said: Did you work with middleware? Build your own engines? How do you explain GoW costing 10 mill to make? And considering you talk about assets I will ask you for what type of games. What were your ambitions? I am going to stick by my point. Saying how much a "game" will cost to make means nothing. You could name the biggest and baddest games and I will ask you how much did you think parappa, gitaroo man, disgaea, indigo prophecy, Capcom vs Snk 2 and many other successful games cost? The design of a game should be based of off several things. But going to school and working with artist and game devs that are now employed at companies like EA, N-Space, midway, Volition, Inc. and a few others, I have seen that game design is all relative. When a project is started how much of the game is already finished? (pet project) How many people working on the game content and assets? What type of game is it, action, FPS, Top down? (affects cost and time of dev alot.) What type of style is trying to be attained?(surreal, stylized, realistic) Procedural generation or all handmade textures? What is the size of the game? What is the focus? Single player or multiplayer? It could go on for days. The bottom line is to say that games have risen in cost this generation only applies to what is trying to be achieved. With the PS3 accepting numerous middleware and Sony giving out EDGE and ICE, and with MS's XNA, there should not be any blanket or generalized statements being made about game dev this time around.

We didn't use middleware because in order to get good performance out of the GBA/Playstation you really needed to build a custom engine for your product; this stopped being true with systems like the Dreamcast and PS2 ... Now, you're right in it depends on what you're trying to build ... a game like Trauma Center probably cost similar to produce for the Wii as it did for the Nintendo DS ... With that said, when people are talking about "Next Generation Games" they do not mean Capcom vs. SNK ... If you doubt what I'm saying go hear ( http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php?category=5 ) and look at all of the postmortems; in most cases you will see PS2/XBox/Gamecube games have development teams of 20-40 people and development times of 18 to 24 months ... Newer PC and PS3/XBox 360 games will have much larger teams and may take longer ( Indigo Prophecy had a development team of 80 working for 24 months ... which works out to being about $30 Million to $40 Million in development costs)