sinha said: There may be valid criticisms, but it's infinitely better than not having patches.

I wouldn't mind patches if they didn't encourage developers to be lazier and worry less about fixing bugs (not necessarily true for all developers).


I'm waiting to see the development tools of systems become more robust which would in turn make developing easier, quicker, and cheaper.  Nintendo is stressing ease of development and the 360 has their VS development environment.  To the best of my knowledge, Sony is the only one with less than stellar design tools.

Hus said: The rising costs = some guy making the budget, some guy oking the budget. The whole you need millions to enter is BS, you want to enter make a PSn or xbox arcade title.

 

Do you even know what you're talking about?

For the most part the GBA was the refuge for the independant developer over the past 5 (or so) years as development costs continued to explode on home consoles and the PC. Developers could produce a GBA game with 4 to 8 developers working for 6 to 12 months which works out to a budget in the range of $250,000 to $1 Million.

Even 'low budget' XBox Live Arcade, PSN and Wiiware games will (likely) require budgets that pass $1 Million in order to provide the graphical assets at a quality that people are willing to accept. This (basically) means that you will personally need millions of dollars to make a game, have a track record of success and know people who have millions of dollars to make a game, or a rare idea that can be produced on a shoe string budget and still you'd need to know people who were willing to work(mostly) for free.

As a general rule the increasing budgets in many/most games has ensured a higher standard for games but at the same time has eliminated creativity; creating new games is risky and it is difficult to get interesting ideas into a completed project when decisions are made by a commitee.

sinha said: Galaki said: I think another problem is the pricing of the final product. Games that are low in development cost should be (allowed) to be priced lower. What sort of regulations are there for pricing the games? That way, you have a choice to buy cheaper games at lower quality or stick with the high priced high quality games. Just like other products such as clothing, wines, etc... I definitely don't agree on games being all at the same price. Agreed, and plenty of games that bombed would have done much better if they were $10-20 less. I don't agree about patches. There may be valid criticisms, but it's infinitely better than not having patches.

I think Big Brain Academy Wii and RE4 show how important it is to price your product right and for games to be priced at varying prices.  Big Brain has done much better on the charts in Europe (at least in UK) than it has in US and Japan because it was released as a budget title just as it should be.  RE4 has also sold much more than it would have at full price because alot of people who already had it on gamecube or ps2 bought it again for the improved controls but might not have if it was fully priced.

 

I think all the games are overpriced in my opinion. 60 bucks is too much money. The problem is that games have become such big budget adventures and there are so many hands in the pot, it takes that much to profit... All the hands that take a cut...

Developer
Publisher
Hardware Maker (license fee)
Distributor
Retailer

Add to that the enormous budgets added to games for the graphics component and you can see where we are headed with the next generation... We keep hearing about these development teams totaling 140+ people to develop the game over 2-3 years... We are now talking hollywood budgets... 150 people at an average of 50K/year plus benefits and such for 2 years is right at $10 million per year... 2 years... $20 million... 3 years... $30 million... and so on...

We either have to accept the cost of $60 games (or higher in the future) or throttle back our expectations that every game have a level of graphical detail approaching complete realism...

I've come to the conclusion that if we take a step back, graphically, even to Wii standards, but turn out incredibly well put together games from a control, story, and presentation standpoint, I'm cool with that as it keeps the cost of the media down...

$60 is acceptable to epic level kind of game. It also have to be AAA title. That is 75% average score or higher.
I buy my games based on average scores usually. That way, I know I will get my $60 worth.
If prices vary, I may buy lower ranked games but that isn't happening anytime soon they way games a priced.

Moderately shocked no one began lamblasting me for my "Sony and Xbox are ruining video games comment". Well, at least it wasn't quite serious.

I have to agree with etuoyo about RE4 (Wii) - it's available pretty cheaply and was just about sold out in the UK for quite a while, yet it's a cracking title and gives hours of gameplay.

In the main, though, it just seems like they keep cranking up the price levels for games with each new console.

In a perfect world, I guess games would be priced according to how good they were rather than all simply defaulting to a standard price - it ain't gonna happen though (unless you wait a while to pick stuff up on eBay).