Can we get a diffinitive post on the actual expinses of next-gen gaming? Everyone states the Wii is cheaper to dev for, and I am sure it is. However, we've never seen any hard facts. I've found the development costs for a few games: Alan Wake: $8+ million USD (per the AW forums) Killzone 2: $20 million USD Red Steel: $12 million USD Blue Dragon: $25 million USD Gears of War: $10 million USD (confirmed price from Epic) Lost Planet: $20 million USD + $20 million in marketing (confirmed, wow on marketing) http://www.joystiq.com/2007/02/03/lost-planet-lost-40-million-to-find-success Halo 3: $25 million USD+ (H2 was around $25m) Also, a computer sci blog writer quoted various industry reports stating the 360 cost an average $15m to dev for (and taking 21 months), and the PS3 costing an average of $20m (similar to the Namco numbers), and taking 24 months. http://compsci.ca/blog/profitability-in-video-game-industry/ However, despite these price tags, old(er) games such as Shemmune was $20m+, FFXII was $35m, Halo 2 was $25m. Can anyone else here provide some insight on other next-gen game's budgets? Reason I ask is this: If you make a Wii game, your looking at around $30 "profit" per $50 game ($20 going to Nintendo, packaging, and the retailer). On the 360/PS3, your looking at around $35-$38 or even $40 "profit" per game (again, around $20 going to retailers/MS/packaging) Now, Namco said that it would take around 500k copies of sales to make 1 game profitable. At $35, we're looking at around $17.5m-$20.0m per game to make. It seems like that price might be the nominal price of a AAA title. The big question is the Wii: How much exactly does a AAA title cost? Red Steel was a whopping $12m. Although this is low(er) than other next-gen titles like Killzone, Blue Dragon and so on, it's still a sizeable increase from last gen (as I believe typical last gen games were around $7-12m). Most analyists say the increase has been around 200% from last gen. If that was the case, then it was around $7m last gen, and $20m this gen. However, due to this, it seems that everyone argues about the dev costs for the Wii being cheaper, which I am sure is true. However, if a development house was going to spend...$20m on a next-gen AAA game like Dead Rising, I would assume between the coding and such, porting it to the PS3 would cost absolutely no more than $5m, as your not building a new game, your just porting the code over to make it work better. Any payment would goto texture artists to get the graphics up to snuff (which really wouldnt matter if you were going from 360-PS3 and vice versa). However, I seriously doubt this price. Some games such as Madden 07 were on 360, Wii, PS3, PS2, PSP and PC. At that point, I don't think the multi-plat cost THAT much. Expecially in the face of Madden 07 selling somewhere near 5m copies total (or atleast will sell 5m copies). So whats your opinion on the development costs? IMO, it seems like a dev will do one of two things, dev for the Wii as an exclusive, save alot of money, but have a limited audience, or go PS3/360 which have a larger overall fanbase for 3rd party games. IMO, as a dev, it'd seem to make more sence to bite the bullet (if I had the cash) to do a 360/PS3 game, share it between systems, as I'd be nearly guarenteed 1m copies on a AAA title (thus far, very few games that reach that kind of hype would do bad on a multi-plat that cost around $20m).

You can realistically spend whatever you want. Nintendo spent $25-30 million on Mario 64. And for marketing, the sky's the limit. THQ indicated the cost of 360/PS3 ports is low double digit percentage of initial cost. Short of a marketing/publishing arrangement or direct payout, this makes exclusives unappealing, unless you expect your audience to be primarily Japanese. With that in mind, I'm in agreement with your theory that it makes a lot more sense to develop for both PS3 and Xbox 360 and forego Wii in many cases.

This post was from another thread that was directed towards a post made by hanafuda, however I don't think it will get the eye views that it needs within that thread, and it does deserve a new thread of it's own. If anyone still doesn't agree that Wii is cheaper to develop for after this then i'm spent, because this is un-refutable evidence and brings brilliant arguments (shines sunshine up my own arse). I'm not a Nintendo fan either, I'm just stating it how it is and providing you with the explanation that you need. Before we actually get into all of the details I want to point out that I believe that lower development costs are not necessarily a good thing, low budget movies are generally crap, so can low budget games... the HUGE budget games generally are the ones that turn out to be the best (see Gears of War, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Sold etc etc etc x infinium) - they get the big budget because they are being developed by a skilled developer with a talented development house. Personally I prefer the more expensive games, i'm simply pointing out the reasons and the facts behind the developers preferring to develop games for Wii because it is cheap. KAPISCH. Thanks. ACTUAL hardware Devkit Costs Nintendo Wii Devkit costs only $1,732 from my sources. PS3 Devkit costs between $30,000 and $50,000 depending on the source and the developer, I don't think they all get the same price. That as your starter is a massive difference JUST to get started, and each major developer doesn't have just ONE devkit per game... they have hundreds. Information - Quotes from developers re: cost of development. You don't need to click the links i've just provided my sources so it's not like i'm talking shit. 1. Ubisoft - http://www.n-sider.com/newsview.php?type=story&storyid=2337 Ubisoft's Red Steel game for Wii will incur a development cost of approximately $12.75 million, according to a report by JeuxFrance.com. Wii is considered to be the cheapest next-generation console to develop for. In May, THQ president Brian Farrell estimated Wii development costs are in the range of a quarter to half of that required for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 development. What does this mean for developers? A game such as Red Steel could cost them between $24 - $48 million on PS3 or 360. Ubisoft NA Head - Laurent Detoc - http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=14497 The lower cost of development and unique motion sensing controls seem to offset the fact that the console is incapable of gorgeous hi-def graphics 2. THQ CEO Brian Farrall - http://www.cnet.com.au/games/wii/0,239036428,240062644,00.htm "One of the things we like about that platform is the development costs...on the Wii are nowhere near what they are on the PS3 and Xbox 360. That's something that's quite encouraging. As you probably know, our portfolio maps very, very well to what we think the Wii demographic is going to be." "[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." 3. Majesco - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=19669 Publisher Majesco has praised the lower development costs of Nintendo's Wii console, and intends to refocus its business to take advantage of the system's potential. 4. Midway CEO David Zucker - http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/6299/ "When you talk about the PS3 and the Xbox 360, ramp-up costs are significant. You don't have the same ramp-up costs on the Wii because you have the tools already," 5. Sony CEO Ken Kutaragi - http://www.ps3focus.com/archives/127 Developing software for the PS3 from scratch will require an initial investment of at least 2 billion yen [US $17.6 million] [not including development costs]. There are not many software companies that can easily afford that kind of money.” Hardware is more difficult, therefore more expensive, through time consuming development and graphics development The most expensive part of developing a game is the graphics, the rest of the game can run fairly well, but the graphics are what takes all the time and effort. Simply the construction of the Hardware Architecture between the PS3 / X360 and the Wii is a major effect of development times. Lets say the same scene needs to be developed for a PS3 game and a Wii game. The PS3 game will require much more programming time for the different lighting, texture and in game effects. Definitely this makes the PS3 games look better but the development time of the same scene is extended greatly. I'm not going into any more details because you're an ANUS for making me do that as it was... I can go more into the technical hardware 'this pipe has this much room' type arguments but i've spent an hour on this post already. If you don't believe it now then you'll never be convinced and you can just live a lie.

9 360 Gears Of War Microsoft 4 141,750 2,510,000 69 Wii Red Steel Ubisoft 4 27,500 335,500 a 10million dollar game sold 2.5million copies, next gen graphics, for 60$ a 12.5million dollar game sold 340,000 copies, last gen graphics, for 50$ Next gen games are not that expensive... compared to last gen. Like Shane said, The sky is the limit. The most expensive part on a game is the graphics/audio/fluff. The core program/programming/etc is cheaper than the graphics/audio/fluff. An example is motorstorm. The textures are photographic textures. (actually taken from a HD video camera) Games like Red Steel, the textures have to be hand-tweaked to make sure they look right, becuase if their not, they wont look as good. The PS3/360 has the advantage they can just take a high rez texture, put it on the screen and it looks great. The Wii, every texture needs to be optimized, Every character model needs to have the lowest number of polygons and still look good. The PS3/360 can go the brute force approach, wich is usually cheaper than the finess way. The Wii can do brute-force, but not much better than a x-box. I'd go with PS3 dev costs will be around 20-30mil (2010) And the 360 being right there next to it. I would say the Wii would be costing in the area of 100,000-20mil. (this is not counting the extreme high cost games) However as was mentioned earlier. the 20mil PS3 game, can be ported to the 360 in a few hundred thousand. So multi platform games would cost half that for PS3/360, while the Wii would be the same, as it would require a complete game to be made for it. Thus making a Wii more expensive to make a multi platform game for. Phew got long winded there.

I was going to give a well thought out reply but I think images will demonstrate better ... http://media.ign64.ign.com/media/012/012700/img_1259527.html http://media.ps2.ign.com/media/566/566218/img_2182650.html http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/684/684224/img_4346321.html I know most people may never have seen an artist work, but I want you to imagine how much time is spent tweeking every texture and model to make it look just right; how many more object have to be made to make the environments more believeable. Without considering the extra textures that have to be added to make the material shaders work, without understanding that every model has to be produced twice (once at an amazing level of detail) to have the normal maps produce, and without thinking about how you will have to animate as many characters sperately in order to ensure that you don't have a dance troop walking around, it becomes clear that there is a lot more work involved in producing a next generation game ... There will always be companies who scale back projects, produce episodal content, offshore work, or find some way to lower development costs; but you can't say that it is less expensive to make these games because half of the levels you would have gotten with the previous version has been left out, you're now being charged more for, or has been produced in Columbia.

Kwaad dude you gotta be kidding me! You think that the developers for PS3 or the Xbox360 have so much top end headroom to move that they can just chuck together a good looking game WITHOUT optimising the textures and the graphics? ARE YOU SERIOUS?? You have a good understanding of technology and high definition and photography yet your comments above about the development of Motorstorm. Motorstorm took TWO YEARS to build, that is MASSIVE for a game of that calibre, no ifs no butts it's a pretty simple racing game with. You're completely crazy if you think that developers on 360 and PS3 don't optimize things. The Gears of War number is distorted as well, yes it cost $10million AFTER the cost of the development of the Unreal Tournament 3 engine which cost MASSIVE dosh. "We spent less than $10 million to make Gears of War. Somewhere between nine and ten million dollars," Rein says. "People are always saying that making next-generation games is really expensive, and we're saying, you should license our technology." That quote about it costing 10 million is all about self promoting the Epic Engine, which is what they made Gears of War from, the 10 million doesn't include the cost of the development of that engine, because that can be accounted for by other sources leasing the engine and that is wasn't 'directly' part of the Gears of War development cost. Sorry but $10million is for PURE development only. Why do you think so many developers are leasing the UT3 engine (even SquareEnix) because this will help them pump out games with Gears level graphics without having to invest so much time into them. Definately a good thing, but the lease cost, plus devunit cost plus game development cost is still going to be higher than on Wii. And dude... seriously, how can you compare the dev cost of Gears vs Red Steel, two games ONLY similar in that they are shooters... it's stupid to compare those games... it's like comparing apples with oranges... actually scratch that it's more like comparing apples with banana's.

Cost of Unreal3 engine. between 700-1million. So it still cost under 11million. STILL less than RedSteel. (that's including the engine)