While we're on the subject of costs, how did PC games do it? They've had the 'HD' hurdle to overcome for quite a while, their models were usually a good deal more complex etc. etc. Or is the short answer, 'they didn't'?
The short answer is more or less that they didn't.
As mentioned before, resolution alone isn't the big factor, but rather how much you can do, and in turn how much you're expected to do. We were already crossing into HD resolutions well before DX9 and SM2.0 and such. But what's the bigger impact on cost? Obviously being able to do that much more per pixel means you're expected to do that much more per pixel and move that much more information down the line, and that's where more content comes into play. Similarly, CPU power increases meant more stuff to do per frame which meant more information and tuning data for artists and designers to keep tweaking at. For that matter, multi-core CPUs are a relatively recent development in the PC space considering how long it had been a battle entirely centered around clock speed.
On that note, it's worth mentioning that a lot of big-budget titles are often not PC exclusives (assuming that the genre is not ill-suited to consoles). Also a lot of PC-specific production also leads down the line of trying to cover a broad range of hardware specs, and so they often split down the middle of their target market, which means that they're working on the basis of capacities that aren't exactly top-of-the-line when the game comes out. OTOH, if you worked on a game right now with the intention of targeting a 32-core Larrabee, you can bet it wouldn't be cheap.
This is the same with movies. You hardly ever hear the advertising budget. However you can still have independent movies that gross very highly. As for liscensing upkeep , they get paid by the party that liscenses the engine. So they should be profiting off the unreal engine.
Making a profit doesn't mean they don't have costs. They made a profit off of Gears as well, but that doesn't mean it was made for free. My point was that the cost of that upkeep is likely a fair bit greater than the cost of developing the engine in the first place.
Devs should share assets with other devs in their company. I really don't see why game A needs all new textures over game B. If they are both set in an urban area. If your going to create a ton of high res textures for a fps set in a city then why would u recreate the same assets for a skate boarding game set in a city. Sure you might want to make a few new models here and there but why replace all the texturs ?
it seems like a hell of a waste to me.
Where do you get the idea that devs are NOT doing this at all? Stuff gets totally scrapped only when you are undergoing a major transition and things aren't done the way they used to be. Asset sharing and maintaining a database of old assets is quite common otherwise, though it certainly yields mixed levels of success. The stuff that really takes time isn't textures and models, but all the adjustments done to them. A new character takes relatively little time to just initially create, but it's when you do all the adjustments, all the tuning, all the revisions, all the tweaks, all the design-related stuff, all the scripting... that's where you eat up time. And asset sharing largely only saves you time on the front end of that picture. Sure, we don't need to create a new tree model for every game, but big deal... we might have a new feature in the next game that says we'll have to rig or markup that tree differently than we did before, or we might have to set up different collision geometry for it, or we might have to punch in different numbers for the flexibility of its leaves or put new trigger volumes around that tree... and just how much have you really saved in the end here?
Shouldn't it become cheaper because of better tools? Also for the 360 its not like devs are creating 40 gigs of content. Its limited to a dvd size also and while compression may have become better the actual content (textures) will take up more size as the resolution of the textures increased.
The quality of tools has indeed improved, but by no means can you possibly say that it has improved enough to offset the difference in asset quantity. I should also clarify that when I talk about tens of GB of content, I'm talking about the original working content quantities that the artists and designers really create and edit and mess with, not the final compressed on-disc content. After compression, packing, archiving, etc, a game can easily fit on a DVD even if it has 40 GB of original content.
To give you an idea, TR:U fits well within the confines of a single Xbox360 DVD, but the actual game folder with all its uncompressed assets, scripts, XML, etc. is quite a bit over 200 GB*. And a large part of that is not just textures or animations or models, but tuning data.
On the opposite end, you had TR Anniversary, which was a budget title even by previous-gen standards, and had a relatively small staff working on a separate code branch from Underworld, and they produced something that, even at a retail price of $30, could have broken even with only around half a million units sold, and it clearly did far better than that. It does happen, and nearly all the same people who worked on that are part of the team pumping out 200 GB of content for a 360 title.
* : Okay, so it's more like 190 GB in terms of "true" GB, but when people speak of disc capacity, it's never in "true" GB. That ended forever with CDs being the last examples to the contrary.
