You can also add to this the fact that large chunks of the work on the game, including some of the most labor-intensive portions, were outsourced to China. So unless other companies have those two advantages as well, I don't think we'll see any more AAA console games with such a low budget anytime soon, not even on the Wii.

theRepublic - Yet if any other company used 1 engine, and stuck with it, costs would be similar to what Epic spent on Gears of War 1 & 2.

Was familiarity an advantage? Yes. Was the fact it's their engine an advantage? Yes.

But it's not like every other company couldn't have the same advantages of developing cost-cutting solutions for in-house engines.

The issue is that using custom solutions for any, and every, blockbuster is a very wasteful practice, when you throw it away immediately after your done with the project.

I'll go on record to say that a game like Killzone 2 is an absolute waste of Sony's money if the developer never sells, or re-uses the engine made for KZ2. Same goes for every big, $30m+ game. You can't spend that much money and not use the assets for something else, if you believe the industry is blockbuster driven.

The solution? Scale down. There's a reason that XBLA games are very profitable.

The burden of fault relies entirely on publishers and developers that think that having a very top-heavy blockbuster portfolio is the best way to do business, it's not. For every Call of Duty, there's a Hour of Victory.

Sticking exclusively to one engine is increasingly common. In fact, it appears to be borderline mandatory for HD games. Capcom's made the MT Framework, Unreal Engine 3 is the workhorse of tons of games in all genres, Square-Enix was forced to make Crystal Tools this gen...out of sheer necessity, your advice to embrace middleware has been heeded. Killzone 2 is the one of the few exceptions to this rule, and I don't think it'll be repeated too much.

Of course, if it was really possible for most developers to make their own re-usable engine, they would have done so, rather than pay literally millions of bucks per game for each game to license someone else's tech. But making such an engine takes years, and millions upoin millions in precious programming expertise. If you're the majority of developers, your motto right now has to be "rock, meet hard place."

And again, I point out that Gears 2 was heavily outsourced. Mind you, that may well be the future of gaming too. Why not? The rest of us, including the most vaunted of professions, are already being screwed by outsourcing, so what's one more industry?

Noname & BrainBox: thanks so much for the information. I can honestly say that this is one of the major reasons for me visiting and eventaully joining the site. I'm no industry insider, I don't know how to research sales numbers, but I am a gamer since the Atari 2600, and have witnessed the gaming industry grow, evlove, and seemingly stagnate.

I think sometimes common sense can go a long way, though many people seem to be bankrupt in this regard ;) In my own experience I remember when the 360 first came out, and I remember thinking "Well damn, how much nicer can graphics get at this point" I was one who was more than satisfied with the best graphic'd games offered last gen. Your RE4's your Metroid Primes, your God of wars, your Rogue Squadrons etc. I was actually considering passing this gen up all together, because I felt all we were getting was the same games we've been playing since the N64 days just with more polygon pushing power.

Bottomline is for me, I knew there was a problem when companies were merging last gen. "I was like uh oh its beginning" Furthermore, anyone who has taken a HS eco class knows the law of diminishing returns. When I read an article on here about Take2 talking about record revenue being made on the PS3, I was also alerted to the fact that this is all just theatrics, trying to quelle the fact that profits are shrinking and in many cases nonexistent. That is scary, especially when we keep seeing supposed "growth."

When a game can sell 1 million copies and still not be enough to recoup dev costs, we are on the threshold of disaster. It isn't my style to be all doom and gloom. But I try to see things as they are, and as I see it the HD business model is broken.

Consoles and PC's used to be two very distinctive sources of video game entertainment now they are near identical. PC gaming is seen as somewhat niche and if consoles continue down this path, so will they.

Good points, both of you.

I was just pointing out that Gears of War is the execption, not the rule, right now.

To add to Noname's point, Epic started work on UE4 in 2003.  It is supposed to be ready for next-gen, which I guess is around 2012 or so.  They are looking nearly a decade into the future with this engine.  I think that is why most developers don't bother to try to do this.

Assuming you're talking about Fallout 3, then yeah, probably Radiant A.I. would be the culprit. Bethesda advertised it during Oblivion's release. They said they put two characters who were suppose to sweep and gave only one of them a broom and eventually the other one killed the other for the broom. Stuff like that.

I must be magic or something, I played Oblivion for over 100 hours on my PC, another 40 on the 360, and played Fallout 3 for over 40 hours, and shit like that and what you described never happened for me. Maybe it's because I usually play as a mostly pure good guy or something, but almost everything is always predictable where it should be. "Craziest" things I saw was a bandit picking up a bow I threw away because I disarmed him, and some guy in Fallout 3 running out of town and immediately getting killed by a Radscorpion after I conned him into fetching something for me.

But nutty stuff always seems to happen to other people. My cousin played Oblivion and I watched as he followed this guard who kept killing an animal every few minutes for meat. I've heard about people playing Fallout 3 and finding 3 out of the 5 Supermutant Behemoths were dead when they found them.

@Noname2000

Good add on the movie base being much larger than the video game base (even if the latter is expanding).

@BrainboxLtd

I concur with your assessment of the herd mentality.

Mike from Morgantown