i was just thinking how far games came to this point in time.

designing a mario sprite was a lot less work then designing the batman in the latest game. costs of development have exploded over time, but will this continue in the next generation?

graphics: games are pretty much realistic and lifelike now. i don't believe designing a character with more polygons will take a lot more time then it does right now. sure they may have better textures and be more detailed, but they are usually designed in high detail anyway, and scaled down to suit the platform they run on, the same goes for environments.

They will be better of course, look better, feel better, better lighting, better physics, but they are the same routines that are implemented alraedy, they will just be more powerful because the hardware is more capable.

motion capture will not change much either from what we have seen this generation. it's almost the same that it's been for decades now. i do not believe there will be a more expensive technique around the corner.

actors are needed already to voice the games, and will be hardly an addition to future costs raises.

sound: we have full epic soundtracks, full voice, enough channels to tell where the enemes are charging at us from. i don't see much added cost there.

of course there will always be factors adding to cost, but i am talking here in the range of 10 - 20%  and not tenfold or more as in the past.

 in my opinion, if there is truly anything that could raise the level of development cost would be the scale of games possible on next generation hardware.

now what is your opinion on this? am i wrong? anything i am not seeing?

what did you do? take a yr off! i said this last yr, and my reasoning behind it hasn't changed cause the cost of dev has not gone down.

well, certainly nintendo saves a lot on voice actors

I just hope games will still be $60 next gen....

Not by the same measure as 6th vs 7th gen. There was a big leap in costs due to tailormade software for multicore processors and implementation of brand new graphics technology as well as HD images and sound for the first time.
Next gen will pretty much be a continuation of this one and the rise in development cost is likely to be incremental.

i don't think Mark Hammil gets much more then the average voice actor rate these days. Star Wars was a long time ago, and they don't actually advertise the games with his name.

He became "that guy who does the jokers voice."

It will increase some but nowhere near as much as last time. Artists are already creating assets at a much higher level than actually ends up in games for various reasons. Additionally it's the number of assets that really makes the difference now we are at the point of visual quality we are at now. Procedural and dynamic assets will help mitigate raising costs in other areas. Dynamic cloth physics will mean that animators won't have to hand animate cloth, Dynamic lighting means you don't have to bake it in etc. 

A lot of the increases in costs this gen weren't to do with graphics anyway, more better voice actors, mocap, licenced music, more advertising, online etc have all been on the rise this gen. Then there is the fact as the average age of the people in the industry increasses so do wages, plus there is a lot more legal and cross licencing these days. Most of these things won't go up all that much next generation (exept maybe voice actors as big actors start to be put into bigger roles).

Since PCs have the better graphics than consoles and its games are not that much and on par with the console games, I would say the next gen would be the same. They would work on higher resolution, better lighting and better physics, that's it, nothing more can be improved.

I think this all depends on how much more power the next gen's most powerful console has over current generation systems. WiiU will not be much more expensive to develop on, yah you need to use the tablet but that shouldn't cost way to much. Nex-Box will likely be slightly more powerful then WiiU but not likely a generational leap like last gen. If PS4 is also slightly more powerful then WiiU then cost of development won't be much higher.

However THQ already stated that if next generation consoles were a true generational leap like we saw with GameCube from 64 or PS3 from PS2, then we should expect a big budget game to retail around 100$ in order for the game to break even. Other publishers have suggested a true next generation game could cost between 20-30 million dollars to make.

Fact is their are a lot of factors that would make a game more expensive, including the ones you mentioned. Face it making a PS3 game can cost millions more then a 360 title. So if you were to jump ahead an actual generational leap then yes development will be drastically more expensive.

"Will game development become a lot more expensive next gen?"

No because the next gen consoles will not have much more power than the current gen. Sony & MS lost billions of dollar with expensive hardware, so they will upgrade the hardware only slightly.

I think it could even be possible that the Wii U has more power than Xbox3 or PS4.