Global Hardware 15 December 2018

[DonFerrari]

Mnementh said:

CrazyGPU said:

4-Switch is very cheap, and its software much cheaper to make than 4k AAA games. Nintendo is Greeeeedy.

People seem to have very few ideas about realistic costs in hardware and software development.

Switch has pretty expensive components like a touch screen, a multitude of advanced sensors and a lot of communication stuff (remember not only the device itself has bluetooth, but each of the joycons). All that is integrated highly to reach a small form factor. This last point is important, as this is an engineering problem, for instance for heat removal.

PS4 and Xbox on the other hand use standard components, put them together in a standard way. They use a big form-factor which simplifies greatly heat dispersion. The biggest technological problems here are mostly the controllers. Which are bigger than Joycons too and make it also easier to integrate a lot of sensors.

So R&D for PS4 and Xbox hardware is nearly at lazy level and manufacturing problems are pretty low, components are straightforward standard. For Switch R&D probably was pretty expensive, setting up manufacturing is because of the small form factor also a lot more complicated and finnicky. And yes, therein you see one reason why smartphones are so expensive.

 

For games similar wrong ideas seem to persist. Basically many people think, the more polygons are visible at the same time, the more expensive the game is. But in reality it isn't that straightforward. True is, if you design the same objects once in high resolution and once in low, the high resolution s more expensive. But for multiplats you actually design the objects only once and let tools recalculate the mesh for different target resolution and performance goals.

More important for the cost of game development is the actual amount of content. If one game has ten times as many objects because it has a bigger game world, then it doesn't matter if each object is a bit simpler. Testing, voice acting, world, character design - these are areas usually taking a lot of manpower. Now you can see the platform is miniscule in the actual impact, the vision for the game impacts mostly the costs. And another point: after developing a game the cost of copying is very small. Physical copies like carts or discs and their packaging and distribution are a bit more expensive, but this is basically the same for each game. So the main factor are sales (assuming constant price). Which means games with expected big sales usually get a bigger budget but sell at the same price.

When you put touchscreen as something expensive you are doing yourself a disfavor. Nintendo is know for not taking losses on the consoles while MS and Sony do. So when PS4 and X1 released they where taking loses about 50 USD. So their consoles costed 450 on the HW itself with MS Kinect adding about another 100 USD. While Switch is probably having some 50 USD profit on the HW... so in the end is 250 vs 450 HW.

On the game you are being misleading at least.

Nintendo investment and cost on their flagship games are much much much smaller than Sony or MS per game. Unless you really think GoW costed almost the same as Odissey to develop.