Developers claim costs for developing for next gen consoles will "double"

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http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-04-03-next-gen-consoles-mean-increased-development-costs

Developers with access to the Durango (the code name for Microsoft's next console) are seeing costs rise sharply, primarily due to higher polygon counts and better textures required. "I'm having to double my budget for models," said one developer working on a sequel to an earlier title that appeared on Xbox 360 and PS3. "If we want to take advantage of Durango's capabilities it takes a lot more time for each model." This can also result in either a longer time to develop a title, or the need to put more artists on, or both.

Hmm, gee, that's weird. PC titles for years have been putting out better textures and higher polygon models, and they primarily sold for less.

What a bunch of bull****.

This just in: X720 titles "80-90$" without the ability to resell them, because Microsoft claims to be killing the used market by making games have a unique ID like PC and locked to your console, not account.


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The Witcher 2; a low budget studio without much money and a basically new IP, has way better textures and models than any console of this generation. And they managed to sell it for 49.99$ and make a huge profit. From an unknown IP.

[video=youtube_share;jk5r1mP6om8]http://youtu.be/jk5r1mP6om8[/video]
 
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You'll have to be more specific in terms of what "IP" means.
 
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I figured everyone would know I was talking about intellectual property. Sure it's based off a book series, but they licensed the rights. And it's very hard to get a new IP to be profitable unless it's incredibly well made. Each year there are tens of new IP's that just flat-out fail. Hence the "Basically" because in gaming today, having only 2 in the series is pretty new.
 

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First of all, your title misrepresents what was actually said in the article. The costs of entire projects aren't going to double, the budget for creating models will double. There is a huge difference, please stop creating misleading and sensationalist headlines. The quality of this forum degrades every time you do that, which is often.

Second of all, in regards to developers managing to make high resolution stuff on the PC for years and still managing to make a profit, there are a couple of things wrong with this statement:

You have to keep in mind that when you release a game on a console, you need to pay Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo royalties. These royalties don't exist on the PC. You can argue that you need to pay Valve royalties if you release on Steam, but these royalties aren't as high as the console royalties, you have no retail royalties, you don't have any manufacturing costs associated with digital distribution like you would with manufacturing and shipping disks on consoles, but honestly, the majority of sales for most games are still occurring at retail anyway, which bypasses digital distribution.

Your argument also ignores the fact that almost every major development studio is moving away from PC's. We have Valve, we have Blizzard, we have CD Projekt, and we have countless indie devs on PC. Valve and Blizzard are both branching out into the console market, and the old titans of the PC industry have already moved (Crytek, Epic Games, hell even Firaxis). The indie devs can make a profit, but the economics of the indie devs are so different that they shouldn't even be mentioned in this conversation. 50,000 dollars a year would be considered a huge success for a one man indie dev shop, plus indie devs aren't the ones putting out high resolution stuff. So really, you just have CDProjekt. CDProjekt own their own digital distribution network, though, so they get 100% of the profits and a major incentive to stay on the PC when it might make better business sense to move into the console business had they not had the digital distribution network. They're in too unique of a situation for them to be valid in this argument, not everyone can be CDProjekt.

Also, you cannot ignore the fact that games are pirated rampantly on the PC. I would bet good money that the piracy rate on the consoles are some stupidly low number, but on the PC, there have been situations where developers have reported a 90% piracy rate. I don't want to hear any arguments about how a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale, because I don't care. If you're in charge of a 300 man studio, and you're trying to keep it afloat, you're going to look at these numbers and want to go to the platform that has a negligible piracy rate.

In regard to the price on next gen consoles, I sincerely doubt that games next generation are going to cost 80 or 90 dollars because of this. But do you know what? Even if they do, it's not because they're trying to **** you. It's because games are genuinely expensive to make. A big budget game needs to sell 1.5 to 2 million copies before it breaks even. Did you know that only 4% of games released ever generate a profit? Because only 4% of games released ever generate a profit. The industry is hit driven, and the biggest hit subsidize almost every other game not making a profit.

This is also why they hate the used game market. I don't blame them if they try to kill it with the next generation of consoles. You have a parasitic entity like Gamestop building a multibillion dollar empire because they buy a game used for 20 dollars and then sell it for 5 dollars less than the retail price. People then buy the used game to save 5 dollars, and that's 55 dollars that the publisher never will see, for a game that in all probability needs the money because, again, only 4% of games ever see a profit.
 
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Sub, you make me want to hug you.

Seriously, apply for an online Gaming Blog or something, you make a great writer.

And I normally don't say this because I don't really have anything against him, but can we ban Jason? He's mocking the forum systems.
 
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Console piracy rates are rampant as well;

Games like Halo, Gears of War, ect, the popular console titles are pirated into the millions as well. So it's not a PC centric issue either.

Everything else you posted is total **** and you are the one degrading the forum with your bull****. The Gaming Industry just reported it's growth rate and it's been growing like mad.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17464931

They've even shown that piracy is actually increasing sales due to more widespread coverage.

In the end, promoting the arts and sciences - the original goal of copyright - basically comes down to spreading them. I'd hazard a guess piracy has done more to spread especially the arts than copyright law has ever done.
 
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Games like Halo, Gears of War, ect, the popular console titles are pirated into the millions as well. So it's not a PC centric issue either.
You're an idiot. This quote proves it.
 
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Console Gaming is going to Kill itself.....
 

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Console piracy rates are rampant as well;

Games like Halo, Gears of War, ect, the popular console titles are pirated into the millions as well. So it's not a PC centric issue either.
If you're going to argue that the piracy rates on the consoles are as prevalent as they are on the PC, you should probably stop now, because you're just wrong. Find me a credible source that shows a comparison between the console and PC piracy rates. Keep in mind that I'm not arguing that there is no piracy on consoles, simply that it is not nearly as rampant as it is on the PC. If you have a choice between releasing a game on a platform where 10% (I'm being generous) of your target audience is capable of pirating, compared to a platform where 100% of your audience is capable of pirating it, you're going to go for the 10%.

The games you listed are also the games already generating a profit. I'm more interested in the console piracy rates of a less popular game, because even humble little games on the PC are getting pirated to hell, and I doubt that's the case for consoles.

Everything else you posted is total **** and you are the one degrading the forum with your bull****. The Gaming Industry just reported it's growth rate and it's been growing like mad.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17464931
First of all, you posted so quickly that I doubt that you even had time to read the link that you posted. There is nothing in that article that disproves what I said. The only relevant fact at all from the article is the following:

Bigger than DVDs, bigger than cinema box office, bigger than music and bigger than books, the video games industry is big business.


With global software revenues exceeding $50bn (£32bn) per annum, and predicted to rise to $90bn per annum by 2015, it is the largest entertainment industry in the world.
So the revenue of the game industry as a whole is now greater than the movie industry as a whole, the book industry as a whole, and the music industry as a whole. This is revenue from the entire video game industry, which means it includes things like Facebook games and iPhone apps like Angry Birds. We're discussing the viability of big budget games in the PC market in comparison to the console market, so that article is absolutely meaningless. Furthermore, the article talks about revenue, not profit. To give an extreme exaggerated example on why this is useless, I can report a revenue of 40 billion dollars, but if I'm spending more than 40 billion dollars in order to generate that money, I am not in a good situation. I once again state to you that only 4% of (presumably presumably traditional) games created generate a profit.

They've even shown that piracy is actually increasing sales due to more widespread coverage.
And again with the piracy. You can sit there and espouse that piracy is this great thing and that it'll really help the industry, but that's just talk, they haven't proved anything in regard to piracy increasing sales. If you're running a huge independent game studio, do you really want to take the chance on the belief that piracy will help you? I think it was two years ago that I saw a talk at the GDC with the president of Epic Games and the president of Gas Powered Games, and another guy as well, talking about what it takes to succeed as an independent studio. Something that stuck with me from that conversation was the fact that even Epic Games, this big and successful studio, is only two failed games away from closing shop. It's hard to keep your doors open if you're an independent game developer, and if 300 people are looking at you to keep their jobs safe, you're going to do everything in your power to make sure that happens, which means going to console and being weary of piracy.
 
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Sub, you make me want to hug you.

Seriously, apply for an online Gaming Blog or something, you make a great writer.

And I normally don't say this because I don't really have anything against him, but can we ban Jason? He's mocking the forum systems.
This, I'm seriously in love with Sub lately! And I love to see him write lengthy replies, it's easy to follow, educational and entertaining. The only reason I ever post in these kind of threads is to compliment Sub for existing! Turned into a good thread nonetheless :p
 
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The person writing those posts is Zeo, not Sub.
 
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Are you serious?! :/ and here I was thinking how good it was to finally have someone that writes long and informative posts but not like Zeo or Avenger since those guys use a vocabulary I'm not familiar with! Dang, what a miss by me!
 
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Are you serious?! :/ and here I was thinking how good it was to finally have someone that writes long and informative posts but not like Zeo or Avenger since those guys use a vocabulary I'm not familiar with! Dang, what a miss by me!
It's Sub.
 
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And its Sarcasm.

You are welcome.
 
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Speaking of failed games. Ever notice that due to the digital era we live in more and more games are getting released unfinished and riddled with bugs because they can simply patch it up later.

Its absurd. If you release a game thats buggy beyond playable dont expect people to even look at it even after you release a patch.
 

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The person writing those posts is Zeo, not Sub.
I know you're joking, but people say this anytime I write anything semi-intelligent, especially during times when Zeo was banned / not around.

Not one of you ****ers ever realized that it was Sub who wrote the majority of what Zeo posted.

edit: Also, thank you Baaja. The story I'm told is that when my mother was pregnant, she started bleeding one day and went to the hospital. The doctors told her that it was almost certain that she was going to miscarry me. She went back two weeks later and the doctors were amazed because, not only had I managed to not die by that point, but I was actually going to be okay. I choose to interpret this to mean that I'm either a hard person to kill, or somehow immortal.

But yeah, I'm glad you exist too.
 
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Speaking of failed games. Ever notice that due to the digital era we live in more and more games are getting released unfinished and riddled with bugs because they can simply patch it up later.

Its absurd. If you release a game thats buggy beyond playable dont expect people to even look at it even after you release a patch.

Indeed. Spending all that money on testers just to release unfinished, buggy, and horrible games. They even have the nerve to charge for DLC that is ALREADY on the disc.
 

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Why is it a problem for the developers to put DLC on the disk? I think there's a perception problem where people think that anything that appears on the disk must have been cut from the game, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. I think it's just as likely that, during preproduction, they realized that they were going to want to have DLC for the game at some point, and decided to make it while making everything else. They could budget it out so that they expect the game to sell x amount of units, which would justify lets say 100 staff working on the game, and then the DLC would sell y amount of units, which would justify 20 people working on the DLC. In this situation, 120 people in total would be on the staff, and the DLC would have never been made in the first place because those 20 guys would not have been hired.

If anyone does cut stuff from a completed game in order to have DLC on launch, then that's a different story, but we can't assume that that's the case for any given game.
 
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Why is it a problem for the developers to put DLC on the disk? I think there's a perception problem where people think that anything that appears on the disk must have been cut from the game, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. I think it's just as likely that, during preproduction, they realized that they were going to want to have DLC for the game at some point, and decided to make it while making everything else. They could budget it out so that they expect the game to sell x amount of units, which would justify lets say 100 staff working on the game, and then the DLC would sell y amount of units, which would justify 20 people working on the DLC. In this situation, 120 people in total would be on the staff, and the DLC would have never been made in the first place because those 20 guys would not have been hired.

If anyone does cut stuff from a completed game in order to have DLC on launch, then that's a different story, but we can't assume that that's the case for any given game.

My biggest problem is the fact that I paid for the content that is on the disc... yet I can't access all of it unless I pay a fee to get the rest of what is on the disc that I just paid $60 for. I mean look at how bad CAPCOM has got with its DLC and changing of games. Street Fighter 4 ($60) ( $20 for Optional Costumes. I ok this) -> Super Street Fighter 4 ($40, Adds around 10 new characters) (Another $40 for optional costumes) -> Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition ($15 to $40) (Adds 4 more characters)


Marvel vs Capcom 3 ($60) -> Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 ($40) (Same thing with Optional Costumes)



I mean, I don't mind the optional costumes DLC and such, but when you make a game and put it on a disc, I would like to at least access everything on this Disc that I have paid for. Its kinda why I went back to playing on PC more then Xbox.
 

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