If Ubisoft decided to do Red Steel 2, they could recycle their own engine, tweak it, and make it cheaper.

The figures are really hard to know - and vary a lot. As someone mentioned, if you want to - you can spend any amount of money (i.e. more than needed), developing any game for any platform. Red Steel is an extreme - Im glad Ubisoft choose to R&D so much (trips to Japan, etc..) but I think a lot of it was overkill. Im sure Rayman cost about half (maybe less) to develop. Gears of War is another "extreme" title - whenever a tech provider creates a game, using that tech - its a LOT cheaper than for another studio. And its not just the cost of licensing - familiarity with the tech, being able to extend it (etc). ... The profits per unit sold are also WAY off. Firstly - there is NO correlation between development costs, and the publishers costs. Marketing is a HUGE part of the budget (usually the most). There are also various other costs that have nothing to do with development. Manufacturing costs I believe are around $6-$10 / unit (no idea of costs / machine). Note that this isn't actually WHAT it costs, just what the manufacturer charges (i.e. Sony, MS). There are also a bunch of other costs - legal, freight, testing services, in-house marketing, packaging/labelling (etc). For a $50US title - retailers usually buy this at around the $28-$33 mark - this varies. They want to make a profit as well ;) Games that start getting expensive also go through a wholesaler or importer - especially for imported (etc), or even 3rd-party titles. So... say it costs about $10US to manufacture/ship a unit. And they sell it to a retailer for $30 - that is a $20 margin. Developers usually operate on "work-for-hire" - that is, they get paid a fixed amount to develop a title for a publisher. For big games, this can be any sort of amount - 1-2mill up to 20-30mill. For companies like Ubisoft (Red Steel) - they OWN the developer. So its a lot cheaper - everyone gets paid a salary, and development budget is much smaller. So 12mill for a launch Wii title is fairly reasonable - includes R&D, and other components. Not sure if they share tech through the company(possibly). For a big title - Gears of War lets say - MS probably paid them a shiteload of cash ($10-$20mill?), and may also be offering them a royalty stream to keep them happy (no idea really). ...just wanted to share.

great kwaad is back with his brilliant posts again. As usual completely ignoring all the facts thrown at him in the post before like the quote by president of ubisoft praising wii for low development costs, and then the fact that Red Steel 2 started development immediately after the first one.

Show me where you got those figures and i'll agree with you, i'm not going searching any more today. maybe to LEASE it but Epic (Gears creators) had to develop that from the ground up which was a HUGELY expensive endevour and SHOULD be equally divided between the different titles that they develop using it and the amount the re-coup from selling it... a worthy tool but VERY expensive to develop.

You my friend are a troll. shams - great post, and it makes sense. However my point is... a N64 game can cost 25million. Let's just look at movies as a great example. Some movies cost 250million to make... (lord of the rings trilogies) Some movies cost under 1,000$ to make. (Evil Dead) I feel the most expensive part on a game is the graphics. I have always felt that way. My point on a PS3/360 can brute force it. Is, today's "next-gen" Stuff is basically last gen stuff running higher quality models. An example of a easy trick. Take about 20 pictures of a standing mesa. (from around it) Model a *very* basic 3D cone. Clip photo's to fit 3D cone. Run bump-mapping optimizations. You have a 'next-gen' style object. To do it on the PS2/x-box/GC/Wii You would be forced to hand model the cone to be more shaped like the mesa would be, as the textures dont carry the detail to make it look like it should, so you end up useing generic textures over specific modeled object. That is one of the few examples where next gen is cheaper than last gen. 6 years ago with modern tech, I would build a Doom3 mod of my living room. All the walls would be flat, basic cube room. Great textures, it would look like everything was 3D... but nothing would be. All textures. Drop the resolution down to 320x240, brutalize the textures down to size as well, and it would look HORRIBLE.

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/engine_details.php?id=25 For Unreal2 it was 750k with unlimited lisence. I doubt Unreal3 would be over 1.5m with unlimited lisence.

Unfortunately, I don't think yo understand some of the complexities of creating a high def game engine (which most developers will do).

Sorry Kwaad, you're completely wrong here. A large portion of Red Steel's development cost was due to extensive R&D with a completely new control system, Wii's FHC. Its complexity in translating movements, (some much better in swordfighting than others, such as blocking & overhead thrusts. struggles in aiming & movement, going through numerous control schemes, etc.) as most of the game's actual level design, engine, & graphics subsystem were done on GC development kits. When the early Wii kits were finalized Ubi took advantage of the extra ram for textures, lighting, & a very few post processing effects. But at its heart, it was still simply a window dressed Gamecube game. Full documentation of Hollywood's abilities weren't even available at that time, nor were middleware tools such as AILive, nor the soon to be released within the updated Wii's SDK, Nintendoware. So Ubi was starting from scratch w/the control scheme essentially, (in addition to they had never developed even an "exclusive" GC engine) & a Red Steel sequel is already in the preliminary planning stages. My source? A Ubi-Soft programmer. Compairing the two is foolish, Epic operating off of an engine they had developed & optimized (one of the most expensive aspects of software development) & simply built the requisite assets around it. An 8hr. single-player game with a heavy emphasis on the multi-player component. (still an excellent game mind you, I'm not being critical) Yes, next-gen gaming in HD *is* quite expensive, much moreso than the last generation.

Thats what I said.

Sorry, but this is not as simple as you think. With brute force you won't achieve anything, because the processors are not as fast as you think. They have both SEVERE architectural constraints, that make them one hell of a ride. This is one of the reasons why so many companies now buy their engines. It is only one group that has to do most of the dirty work. The complexity you encounter leads to very complicated code and this to a very complicated testing. Not the initial development is the most expensive part, the testing and bugfixing is! Don't expect that the new engine will be as cheap as you think. Without a good and responsive support you won't achieve anything. I would expect that they don't want a bigger fixed amount but more a fraction of the price each game earns you. This has advantages for both sides. The game developer does not need so much money before he can even start to develop and it pays the support-calls. The engine developer will instead get more money than he could have asked, because every big title is also a big title for him. The Wii is a much simpler platform. You can develop the game engine easily yourself. While you wont earn money with the first title the next few titles are based on a slightly modified engine, that you get for nearly no costs at all. So it is simply wrong to calculate the complete development costs for one title. You can distribute these costs to several titles. What you miss in your comparison with the movie industry: you can reuse every set, every costume and even every actor. You only have to rewrite the roles of the actors and pay for changes. This can't work in reality. You can't put the sets away for later use and the actors really demand money for every time, they show up...