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Forums - Sales Discussion - Next-Gen Development Costs

mrstickball on 28 March 2007

I think one of the arguments for this generation will be the use, and optimization of middleware techology. Most of the money goes to building an engine to use, then the rest goes to artists and then programers coding things into the engine. Gears of War is a prime example. It was made VERY cheaply by a studio that knew how to use an engine. Because of that, they made a game which has made probablly $100m in profit, for a tenth of that. The huge advantage the Wii has isn't in a better development space, or cheaper devkits (yes, the devkit might be $25k less, but you still have to pay the programers $50k a year to build the game), but in the fact the Wii's horsepower doesn't allow it to require *ON AVERAGE* a whole lot more money, as the textures and graphics will never be to the level of a PS3 or 360 game. Again, if studios can learn to live with valid middleware such as Havok, Unreal, new lighting & shader technology, the average price of a next-gen game could get close (but not quite) rival the Wii dev bugets - whilst having a large graphical edge. However, time will tell if companies really latch on to Unreal engine(s). However, MS has been making a big push for studios like Mistwaker to use it. Hopefully, the UE3 engine lowers the price of Lost Odyssey to lower than the $25m that Blue Dragon took.



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HappySqurriel on 28 March 2007

mrstickball said: I think one of the arguments for this generation will be the use, and optimization of middleware techology. Most of the money goes to building an engine to use, then the rest goes to artists and then programers coding things into the engine.
Even in the PS2/Gamecube/XBox generation most of the money went to artists. The reason why the Unreal 2 engine was so popular on those platforms has less to do with saving money on costs associated to programmers and (way) more to do with ensuring that your artists have mature tools to work with inorder to increase productivity. Note: The tools can either be part of the engine licence, or the engine can just support file formats that are from common tools.
mrstickball said: Gears of War is a prime example. It was made VERY cheaply by a studio that knew how to use an engine. Because of that, they made a game which has made probablly $100m in profit, for a tenth of that.
Well, I suspect that Gears of War may have been produced using a common library of Game Assets being developed by Epic; this library would be used in future Unreal games.
mrstickball said: The huge advantage the Wii has isn't in a better development space, or cheaper devkits (yes, the devkit might be $25k less, but you still have to pay the programers $50k a year to build the game), but in the fact the Wii's horsepower doesn't allow it to require *ON AVERAGE* a whole lot more money, as the textures and graphics will never be to the level of a PS3 or 360 game.
Well, the Wii's advantage is that the lower technical specifications mean that less artistic content (and lower quality content) is produced at a much lower cost to produce the same game.
mrstickball said: Again, if studios can learn to live with valid middleware such as Havok, Unreal, new lighting & shader technology, the average price of a next-gen game could get close (but not quite) rival the Wii dev bugets - whilst having a large graphical edge.
Generally speaking, probably not ... Even if you licence a large library of shader effects your team of artists will still have to add aditional textures to their objects in order to supply these effects with data. Where most of the savings in Next Generation games development will come is from game asset libraries that are produced over multiple game releases; if EA releases a new Medal of Honor game every year by the end of 2010 most of the game assets they would want to produce another game will have already been created.



Christopher_G2 on 28 March 2007

Killzone 2 and Halo 3 aren't going to be released for months so how the heck are the budgets know?



Hus on 28 March 2007

doe anyone know the budget for Gran Turismo games... Sonys biggest seller i cant even imagine how much they get.



fooflexible on 28 March 2007

Kwaad said: 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.
I know we're going on about this already, just wanted to add by this logic the older the game the more epxnsive, and that simply isn't true, heck forget the textures and polygon counts on models alone takes insane time. Look at all the work on Heavenly Sword with motion capture on peoples faces, thats another whole element. Then all the extra effects and the extra layers on objects to make them look even more real. And despite the raw power of the ps3 and x360 you still have to do tons of opmtimizing to get it to run smoothly. Secondly as far as Red Steel goes, it was their first Wii title, I'm more then sure alot of the development cost was ground work for engines and other experience developed for future projects.



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Kwaad on 28 March 2007

kars 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...
First of all. Your saying the PS3/360 have no more power than the Wii... I'm not even gonna laugh... That is pathetic sad. a 10x bigger CPU, clocked at a higher clock speed... = not any better really. a 10x bigger GPU, clocked at a higher clock speed... = not any better really. Your logic is flawed, because that's what you said comes across to me. A highly optimized 3D model and great textures looks good. a Massive poly/texture model looks great. Basically either way they look the same. One uses 4x more power to do tho. Considering the PS3/360 have roughly 10-20x more power... they can easily brute-force 4x better graphics. fooflexible - I'm not saying that is the way all games are made. Some are, some arent. A prime example of what I meant, was motorstorm, is using medium quality models, with KILLER textures. I dont think Motorstorm looks that great. Everyone says how beautiful it is. Their full of it. A simple bump-mapping texture. (think track mark, but useing bump-maps) is how they do the mud. Then add a path diffrence to allow the wheels to go down into the 'bump-mapped' ditch. The vegation looks bland, flat, and Seriously last gen. The Vehicles look great, but compared to GT4... I'd say that Motorstorm looks about 2x better. GT:HD Concept looks MUCH better than motorstorm. I think motorstorm was more of a physics demo, than a eye-candy toy. I mean, motorstorm has AMAZING textures. Infact, their photo's slapped on a 3D model. Cheap, Efficent, Looks great. But I have never played a game where you have that kind of physics/drivetrain.



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r2007 on 28 March 2007

Scott Steinberg, Sega

BIZ: One of the supposed advantages of developing for the Wii is that it should cost far less than developing on Xbox 360 or PS3. How much would you estimate Wii development to be on average, or how much less than 360 or PS3 do you think it is? SS: Yeah, I’ve been asked this question a lot and it’s difficult to put it [in terms] of the kind of relationship you want, headline type relationship, because it’s like buying a car… You can buy a $100,000 car or you can buy a $20,000 car. Next-gen games don’t automatically cost $20 million dollars. It really depends on what you want to create. And you can spend, and people do, spend $15 million on today’s gen games. So, there’s no doubt that Wii is a more affordable [console] for developers and publishers to build games on; it’s much more analogous to the GameCube. And there’s no doubt that you can spend a lot of money chasing billions of polygons on the 360 and PS3, but you also don’t have to. I think the industry uses the 2X factor on next-gen games and that’s certainly a decent rule of thumb—it doesn’t always have to be that way—and we’re far below that on the Nintendo Wii. There’s no need—well you can I guess—but there’s no need to go that high.
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2006/07/03/sega-speaks-about-ps3-wii-reveals-virtua-fighter-5-sonic-wild-fire-due-march-2007.htm



shams on 28 March 2007

Kwaad said: shams - great post, and it makes sense. However my point is... a N64 game can cost 25million.
Ohh, look - I agree completely. Firstly - (as mentioned) - its possible to make *any* game more expensive for any platform - just give it to an incompetent team/company (Acclaim or Infogrames anyone?) for instance. Plus - the hardware restrictions of the N64 (yes 4k texture cache!) can actually add more development time, as its SO hard to squeeze more out of the machine. In the end, it *does* come down to the company, platform (its possible to make a GREAT Ps3 game cheaply, and possible to make a SUCKY Wii title for $100mill). All you can do is look at averages.



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shams on 28 March 2007

Hus said: doe anyone know the budget for Gran Turismo games... Sonys biggest seller i cant even imagine how much they get.
How many people work at Polyphony? Have they released *anything* except the GT series for about 10 years? They would cost a LOT. Just imagine the licensing costs for 1000 (or even 250) cars. Working with every car manufacturer, and the approval process(es) involved. I wouldn't be surprised if the *total* dev cost of a full GT game was in the vicinity of 10-20mill (maybe up to 30m). Still, if the games sell around 10m each - and its a 1st party-title - Sony probably make a raw $40/unit, which is a significant (long-term) profit - plus system seller.



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elprincipe on 29 March 2007

Kwaad said:That is one of the few examples where next gen is cheaper than last gen.
Do you have any evidence to back such a statement up? It is completely contrary to what every developer on record has stated (see one of the posts above for a good list). Do you have any sort of indication other than your personal guess that this could be true? Because it seems pretty out there really.



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