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Forums - Sales Discussion - Next-Gen Development Costs

Li Mu Bai on 29 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. 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.
Current Wii Middleware & upcoming middleware toolsets: -The Vicious Engine (used for TMNT cross-platform dvelopment) -AILive -Unity -Nintendoware (should be available via the updated Wii SDKs including TEV shader implementations, text-to-speech recognition, Wii emulation on high-end PCs so artists can quickly see accurate previews of special effects, & predictive motion sensing. Whereby a game can predict what your next movement is likely to be to create smoother Wii controller movements in-game) -id software As the uerbase grows, so to will the number of middleware solutions. 360/PS3 dev. costs will not be "close" in price to the Wii's, accept this as fact.



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kars on 29 March 2007

Kwaad said: 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.
Compared to the things they have to do, they are much more at their limits. And don't think about their theoretical burst rates. In reality you can be glad if you get even a third of their theoretical power out of them. Only an idiot would add the burst rates to get the real performance. Both the Xbox 360 and especially the PS-3 don't like it, if you have to get them out of their stream modes. If you don't need to stream their rather deep pipelines become a problem! Every capable programmer knows that most benchmarks might look great, but are without any real value, unless you add more background. Due to their more complex designs engines are in fact more limited. This will especially hurt the PS-3 because its programs can be fast, if you specially craft them around the SPUs. This is beyond the scope of engines. They can only fit to the PPE and put some functions to the SPUs, that they have in their libraries. While the cache of the Xenon is not fast, its architecture is much more accessible to an engine, but optimizations are limited nonetheless. The Wii has the advantage that it does not depend so much on optimization.