One concern I have is development costs shooting through the roof on games, because game companies feel they must out-quality production their competitors, and deliver a more and more refined experience. What started as cut scenes became voice acting throughout the game, and a director and so on added. What started as the addition of a storyline, became the need to hire professional writers to write scripts that are credible. What started as an attempt to improve graphics for immersion factor, ended up evolving into maximizing hardware and hiring over 100 people to do graphic rendering. And then, there is the team responsible for adding cinematic like sound, and lots of sound sampling.
Along the way, I see developing costs pushing over $100 million for games. El Shaddai a platformer costs over $75 million? Really.
Well, let's look at these numbers. The moment development costs hit 9 figures, you now have suites wanting to see sales forecasts, and justify they are sales. Where do you justify these sales numbers? You look at prior track record of sales for games. A game is in an established genre that will sell MILLIONS, or so it goes. The idea is, if you add the right elements, it will take off. And then, with a few hits, everyone piles in, expecting to be the next Modern Warfare (talk to EA about spending $100 million to market Battlefield 3 ALONE on this).
But where is the novelty and innovation here? If this model keeps going, are exploratory projects going to bother to get funded? If not, isn't the end result going to be less genres and more blanding and more of the same? In the end, it will be boring, and could be that the industry will die due to boredom. It will be the movie industry all over again, requiring every gamer to wear 3D glasses to play. Can't think of anything new, just add more realistic explosions. Death by Michael Bay.
Anyone else have these concerns?
