Actually I think Mckmass is somewhat correct. Epic has 3 teams, 1 is dedicated to solely working on the engine, and another works on Gears of War.
It obvious, that the develeopment of Gears was directly influencing the development of the UE3 engine and SDK, due to Rein's comments about the the UE3 SDK for 360 being far ahead of the PS3 SDK. Epic has even gone so far as to say that Developers shouldn't really use UE3 until Epic themselves have shipped their first full game.
So obviously, alot of the costs of tweaking, optimizing and rewriting the engine was being written off as UE3 engine development, a developer who licensed the engine would not have that luxury, all modifications and updates to the engine would increase the budget for the game.
I am not sure where you are disagreeing with:
Acert93 said:
The engine and the game -- UE3 and GOW -- were effectively built together
Epic is a game developer.
Epic is a game tools developer.
They mutually serve eachother, and is one of their key synergies in bringing a product to market that is effective. It is designed, tested, and published as a real world product that *Epic* themselves uses.
So while you can knock them for "tweaking" UE3, that is a key selling point of the platform: It is not theoretical, but a "live" product.
I don't think it's unfair to say Epic is hiding some of the costs for GOW, alot of the engine development/modifcation costs that most other devs would have to pay, are being covered by the UE3 development team.
That is assuming Epic's 20-50 person team had no one on the budget actually programming for the game and writing code. Just because their "Engine & Tools Development" team is separate from their "Game Dev Alpha" team doesn't mean the former has no programmers. And as noted above, many of those "tweaks" are realworld refining of the platform and testing the middleware to bring it to market as a real product. If Epic cannot demonstrate an excellent, realworld example of their engine in a timely manner that demonstrates AAA quality, then others will be hesitant to license the product. Risk/Reward of their market strategy.
Anyhow, I think your position assumes that their game dev team lacks programmers. We obviously don't know what they are including in their dev budget. But we do know that their team size, which frequently has a major impact on development budget, was not massive (20-50 people the entire time). Further, knocking them for tailoring the engine for UE3 overlooks the reality that UE3 and GOW are mutual projects. Put another way
• What is the best software technology targets for 2006? => UE3
• What is the best use of UE3 => GOW
Obviously, and I don't think anyone would disagree, UE3 was Epic's best guess on what hardware would be like in the 2005-2006 timeframe. Likewise, GOW was designed to be their best artistic use of said technology.
So "tweaks" to UE3 for GOW is kind of stating the obvious. When you license UE3 you are buying an engine that was not only targetting 2005/2006 hardware, but as well being co-developed and "dry ran" on GOW.
Just too many "what ifs" -- especially assuming their game dev team has no dedicated programmers.
Where we CAN say Epic can / could cut corners is timely support, first access (and the ups and downs of such), but probably most importantly as you note: They own/created the software and it was designed for their game. Not only do they KNOW it well, but it was designed for what they envisions would be problems developers would have based on their own vision of a game using the technology.
Of course as a 3rd party you weight that: Do I license the software for $1M+ and add in a solid 6-12 weeks of time to get up to speed or do we do R&D and engine development for 12 months and use our own tools?
That's all fine and good, but for the purposes of determining *just* what Gears costs, at least licensing fees should be added.
Fair enough, so make it $12M :smile:
I wouldn't say that Epic is above fudging the numbers some. e.g. 10M seems aweful round and even. 14M rounds down to 10M you know
People want to know how much *Gears* costs, whether the payment of that cost was spread out over multiple divisions or whether it's recouped from licensing.
I think we can answer those questions with a high degree of certainty.
1. We are just pontificating... but for publishers I think they would look at the people they have, look at a demo of the software and compare it to the stimates their engineers give them for building a custom suite of tools for the project. It would be nice to have more info on this process, but it isn't one well publicized
2. I think it is obivous the cost of developing UE3 was NOT included in the cost of GOW Epic mentioned. I think elsewhere they gave some big number for UE3 development costs. 10M for GOW and all the engine development -- for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 up to this point -- as well as the support they offer seems unlikely. 10M for GOW seems low enough as it is.
3. They definately are recouping engine costs through licensing. This is how, as a small independant developer, they were able to sink millions into R&D and tool development. If GOW was another Unreal-level success, UE3 development without licensing would have hurt them. Licensing is their business model, and very effective one as they timed the market nearly perfectly. With the success of GOW and the continued improvement of the tools and quality improvements -- as well as creating one of the few middleware solutions that can support PS3/PC/X360 portability -- they have set themselves up in a position to have strong licensing all generation.
As a side note, I think publishers have overstated some of the costs. Partly to defend the $10 price increase on games. Also as a way to cover the increasing risks in the market ("small" games are increasing in cost as well, so niche games carry more risk) as well covering their own mistakes (e.g. a hard launch date on a product behind schedule, so tossing 2x as many people at the problem to get increase production by 15%). We never see breakdowns and never will. A lot of loose money in advertising, development, resources (e.g. people are on a projected, jetted off to another, and yet another, never finishing a single project). All of this is under the bean counters who have to make it pretty for investors and for tax collectors. Getting firm numbers not only would be difficult, but would not be very advantageous.
What we can do though is watch their profits versus sales. More than anything that can be a good indicator of how they are doing. I don't believe a lot of publishers had planned well for next gen (never do), and that we are in that rough time when the old consoles are dieing and the next gen consoles have small install bases and few compelling apps to urge significant purchases above the impulse range. So we will hear a lot of publisher "too expensive! need to raise prices" whining. It happens ever time though.
