I dk why PS360 owners are arguing that their games are as cheap as Wii games. That is not flattering at all, lol

There does not appear to be any publicly available info on the pricing for the Unreal 3 engine.

The Unreal 2 engine was 350k plus 50k per additional platform plus a 3% royalty based on wholesale price/sales.

So if a game wholesales for $30, that is 900k revenue per 1M sales.

Using a $40 wholesale price for GoW, that is $5.7M in royalties that an external developer would owe Epic -- plus whatever the licensing fee would be (at least $350,000 -- maybe 2x-3x). 

What this means is the actual comparable cost of developing Gears of War is $16M-$17M.  Much closer to the $20M people talked about. And it means a high-end Wii game is only 62.5% the cost of a high-end, budget-protected Xbox 360 game.

Mike from Morgantown

^Are you assuming $10M for a high-end Wii game?
Because I once read a paper - by a software company hiring personnel - that placed PS2 costs in the $5-12M range, and that was about 2005. I don't know, though, if the 12M was for some rare and really big project for the time, like the 100M of GTAIV nowadays, or a more common occurance.

Are there sources for absolute values for, say, SMG or going down a notch for MP3?

Update:

Not what I was looking for, but I found these

- E3 May 2006, THQ president Brian Farrell: "[The Wii] wasn't a whole new programming environment," Farrell said. "So we had a lot of tools and tech that work in that environment. So those costs--and again, I hate these broad generalizations--but they could be as little as a third of the high-end next-gen titles... Maybe the range is a quarter to a half."

This is the most famous one. Is this where the "quarter" number comes from? Interestingly, he blames the reduction of costs mainly to not having to develop new tools and retrain staff.

- August 2006: "Ubisoft's Red Steel game for Wii will incur a development cost of approximately $12.75 million."

I've seen this quoted around, but I could not find the official source, if any.

- November 2006: "THQ Inc. Chief Executive Brian Farrell said that investment in a next-generation video game can run roughly $12 million to $20 million, while a title for the Wii could be in the $5 million to $8 million range."

This last one seems to have been quoted many times. Again, he speaks about "ramp-up costs" to move to the HD platfroms. Please note that this corrects his own former evaluation into a slightly more conservative 25-75%.

- February 2009: EA's John Riccitiello: "development is typically a third to a fourth as much for a Wii game than it is for a PS3 or an Xbox 360 game" largely due to Wii developers "producing less art than for high-definition games."

So basically, ps3 is more expensive to develop for relative to ps2 because developers CHOOSE to put more detail and thus, more time into their ps3 projects? Note the keyword "CHOOSE". PS3 isn't intrinsically more expensive to develop for...it's individual developers that raise their own costs. No one will assassinate Nomura & Co if FFXIII didn't look as good as it does. Millions would still buy the game. It's the devs themselves that are creating their own problems.

MH3 could have released on ps3 with the graphics and thus, time spent for release on wii. It's capcom who decided that since they can spend RE5 time on MH3, it should be a wii game. To blame the PS3 and 360 for these rising costs doesn't make sense to me. It's devs that chose to raise the costs by themselves by competing to say "hey, mine looks better than yours" which is why we have our current problem. If you can't afford the time (and thus, money), don't do it...simple and short. PS360 provide flexibility i.e you can do whatever you want as opposed to the graphical glass celing on wii for graphics-focused studios. Sony and M$ don't refuse licenses for games that aren't graphical powerhouses.

You can see it as a choice, or as pretty much an obligation in the never-ending graphics arms race. It would be quite interesting to see what would happen if someone made a PS3 game with Wii graphics, but seriously which publisher is going to do that?

^Disgaea 3? Also the upcoming "Mars" RPG will cost $3M. Even with its Phyre engine coming for free from Sony, I bet its low cost means that it won't have great assets.

Ever hear of Disgaea 3? I can also name other graphically unimpressive games: Valkyria Chronicles, The Club, etc which can be done on wii. The reason it doesn't seem like they can is that hardly  anyone pushes the little the wii can do to even 50%, not even nintendo in many cases.

So you admit that it's the "graphical arms race" thats paralyzing companies? How is that the fault of the PS360 as consoles? It seems to me like our game devs have a problem with their ideologies.

I will post this again:

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/04/more-wii-games-from-ea-thanks-to-low-development-costs/

As it is a recent news story where EA notes the lower costs of developing for the Wii. There is even a link to a 2009 story citing the one-third/one-quarter ratio.

I find it amazing how some people cannot accept the words of experts. In other words, I think EA would know more about development costs than at least 90 percent of the posters on here.


Mike from Morgantown

That's interesting, I didn't know that. I doubt they'd have great results in many genres though, especially FPS, driving and action games. It will probably remain the exception rather than the rule, especially with competition from first party games which invest a lot in graphics.

@Pristine20: I never said the PS3/360 per se are to blame, they're just the culmination of a problem which has been going on for quite a while... The problem is that costs have been rising faster than revenue, and now we're finally at the breaking point where even many of the biggest publishers can't cope. Somehow this problem has to be solved.

Considering only games that people would (generally speaking) call "Good" games development budgets on previous generation consoles ranged from (about) $2 Million for low budget games (like Starwars: Rogue Squadren 2) to roughly $20 Million for the biggest budget games. In this generation the Wii's games stay in a similar budget range to previous generation consoles (with a far greater number of low and ultra low budget games), and the HD console's games have hit a point where a low budget game is approaching $10 Million and a big budget game can surpass $100 Million.

Now, on average producing similar games for the Wii will cost around 1/4 to 1/3 as much as a HD game would. A few publishers have used this lower development cost to produce a lot of games in multiple genres, targeting multiple demographics, at various budget levels in order to have very reliable revenues from the Wii ... While few people really love Ubisoft at the moment you can see how they follow this approach, and they (probably) were able to develop Shawn White Snowboarding, Rayman Raving Rabbids: TV Party and several licenced games as well as buying rights to No More Heroes for the same ammount as it would cost to produce a fairly average HD game. When you look at a game like Assassin's Creed you might think that (from a business perspective) their strategy for HD consoles is better, but for every super successful HD game there is on or two (potentially more depending on the publisher) that struggles like Haze did ...