Um, developers have gotten it into their heads that spending more money is better, not worse.

It definitely seems inevitable, though i wonder if they're taking near-optimum levels into account (i.e. assume that the average 3DS game will be equal to or greater than the average PSP game in production values, when they could conceivably continue making DS-level games for the new hardware)

otherwise it'll be interesting seeing where some of these developers go. Marvelous is going to have to sell, Nippon Ichi is going to be annihilated (though i'm surprised they haven't collapsed already)

I know, but some small devs that have made ds games might not be too happy. ds was great for small devs because of low costs

Well there is nothing that says they have to up the costs of their games to match a typical 3DS game. Some got smart and still kept the costs low, even on downloadable games on the HD systems.

So its still cheaper than PSP? Whats the problem then?

PSP2 dev. must be ALOT more in comparrison.

three times zero is still zero :kiss:

Since (roughly) the SNES generation, every new generation of hardware has resulted in development cost increases of 2 to 4 times the previous generation's development costs. The core reasons for this increase is that there is more work required to produce a single graphical asset and there are more graphical assets required to produce the higher detailed graphics associated with each generation.

Handheld games have (generally speaking) had much lower development costs than console games because the hardware is a couple of generations behind consoles, new tools and better procedures make creating graphical assets (at those quality levels) less time intensive, and handheld games are generally much smaller in scope than home console or PC games; but from generation to generation the costs associated with creating a handheld game have increased between 2 and 4 times what the previous generation's development costs were.

The 3DS having increased development costs isn't that much of a surprise, but I suspect a lot of developers will avoid having to deal with that by producing more traditional sprite based games rather than push the limit of the 3DS.

I hope it turns off the ones that want to develop shit games. Looking through a pile of Wii and DS games at stores can be disappointing.

One has to remember that we are comparing current gen platforms to a next gen console.

The 3DS' dev costs are probably much lower that those of the PSP2/Super Wii/720/PS4.  Just the gap won't be as big as this gen.

Well it could very well mean that we'll see less shovelware for the 3DS. Definitely would not like to see shovelware with tacked on not even 3D effects.