What's the average development cost for next generation?

[DeadlyNinja]

I'm getting kinda worried about the next generation of consoles after looking at the new video cards. This generation, average development costs are what, 10-20 million? How much will it increase the next generation?

Outside of visual advances, the games are roughly the same games as last gen (just more obnoxious and pretentious). Just bigger and more shiny. Right now, the markets are so focused on visuals that anything looks remotely shiny is hyped to high heaven. They also get a free pass when it comes to reviews. Crysis while I really did enjoy, isn't anywhere near as good or bad (there's anti-hype where people call it nothing more than a tech demo) as some would suggest. The amount of genres have shrunken drastically to appease 13-15 year olds who thinks blood and tits is what makes a good game. They sell, and publishers continue to make more of the same crap. All this because of the size of the budget required to make these games.

Look at the cool new ideas still coming from Japan. They're able to experiment because they don't have budgets that big, so they usually focus on smaller platforms like DS and PSP. The west does have a lot of great ideas, but they're usually coming from indies. The only problem with that is they get overlooked while an FPS about bald men squeezing breasts till blood comes out gets all the limelight and herald as art. I'll willing to bet Scribblenauts would be a zillion times more expensive if 5th Cell made the game on CryEngine 2. Hell, outside of Scribblenauts, I can't think of any other Western developer who tried to do anything innovative on the DS.

I have a PC and a DS, and the PC hardly gets played. Once the novelty of the visuals run out, I found myself going back to playing my DS... at home. Since modern PC and 360 share 90% of the library, I use the Xbox 360 game list to look for more modern games to play, and I see 319 shooters while the rest of the genres number in less than 50 except for racing. I end up having only 3 different genres in my PC library while my DS collection is huge. Worst of all, some of the PC games I bought I ended up really regretting it due to all the hype and glowing reviews.

I'm really worried that development costs will cause publishers to just crowd around the 5 or 6 genres that sell/pander to the lowest common denominator. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying modern games or shooter suck, because I have around 10 shooters on my PC. I'm just worried my PC/console/handheld will have 50 games and 48 of them are shooters once development budgets reach 100 million.

 

[TEXAN*]

$20m-$250m Average cost of next gen development 2011-2016.

Only the mega publishers shall survive in this environment.

SEGA SAMMY
ACTIVISION BLIZZARD
ELECTRONIC ARTS

I can see Capcom and Konami merging. Ubisoft, Take 2 and THQ shall require mergers also.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Ubisoft??? They're already huge with several thousand developers, and have some of the big franchises: Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed, Rayman, Brothers in Arms, Far Cry, Might and Magic...
They're also profitable and have some interesting ideas about expanding into other forms of media.

As for next gen development budgets, a lot of it depends on what exactly the new hardware is going to be. If motion controllers turn out to be the next big thing then we may not see such a huge increase that dynamic lighting, shadows and normal mapping created in art production...

 

[eastmen]

Gears was done for 10m .

I don't see costs sky rocketing like you guys seem to think . In fact I think it might go down.

Next gen gpus will be based around dx 11 and they should have larger ram amounts. But developers are already modeling with millions of polygons and then turning them into normal maps . I don't see the costs hitting them like it did this generation.

Look at Unreal engine 3. Aside from liscensing it out , epic has made 3 games already and are most likely starting on their 4th using the same engine. Of course work continued on the engine but costs are not going to be nearly as much as if they redid the engine from the ground up each time. The only thing that can really increase in costs is asset creation. But there should be ways to stem those costs also.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Practically everyone agrees that the Gears cost figure is marketing bull****. They've probably excluded outsourcing or engine development costs or so. Or they just don't include bonuses in dev costs (Epic employees are some of the best payed guys in the industry from what I hear - though there's no doubt that they're really worth their money).

Heck, Call of Duty 2 has cost 14 million, I can't see how Gears could be made for less.

And yeah, so Epic has made 3 games, cool, but has anyone looked into their accounting books? If not, how can you say anything about costs?

 

[TEXAN*]

GTAIV cost $100m.

The question is how much will GTAV on XBox 720/PS4 cost?

 

[Svensk Viking]

GTAIV cost $100m.

The question is how much will GTAV on XBox 720/PS4 cost?

Isn't GTA expensive due to all licenses they have to deal with?

 

[assen]

So what is that fountain of originality from Japan has produced on DS that is not roguelikes, JRPGs, pet simulators and brain training games - hardly any novelty in any of them?

As for the budgets - I would suggest you scan the forums for mentions of Blu-ray and DVD, and ask your question to all the people on these boards who consider DVDs CLEARLY incapable of holding true next-generation greatness, and insist that a 50 GB Blu-ray is bare necessity for a game.

 

[Silenti]

Isn't GTA expensive due to all licenses they have to deal with?

Begging your pardon, but what licenses? The cars bear phony names and are visually a bit different from the real thing, do they still pay license fees on those? This is an area I have never gotten a straight answer on. It stands to reason that if you make a Bond game, you pay the rights holder, but do you also have to pay for every real plane, location and gun in the game? Just what does a developer have to pay license fees for?

If I were to model a city, with a real grocery store and all the proper items on the shelves, cars in the lot, etc and then hold a "Heat" style shootout, what do I owe license fees for? Each different brand of peaches down to each gun and car in the lot? The city government for the city I modeled? The US DOT if I have a federal highway outside?

I'm dead serious, I've never understood, or gotten a straight answer, regarding when one has to pay to license and what is free. I don't believe movies pay a license fee for guns or cars, why do games have to? If the reason is Hollywood buys or rents the real thing for use, then the license cost had better be well under that cost or you are better off buying them and then selling the stuff off afterwards.

Anyone have any insights here?

 

[AlNom]

The music? Voice talent (including radio). That $100M must also include marketing. There were reports of 1000+ people working on the game, but who knows how that works out.

 

[obonicus]

Over on GAF I believe Fafalada has commented that Japanese studios have managed to keep budgets more or less the same for HD titles -- not sure if it was speculation or if he has inside info. Not entirely surprising considering how simple lower-profile Japanese HD games are.

 

[Zassk]

I'm sure GTAV will leverage a lot of the same engine, just render at better detail, as we know it can do from the GTAIV PC version. In terms of licenses, there was a lot of tech for the physics and inverse kinematics and so on, I have no idea how much of it came from out-of-house, but I'd guess that it is substantial.

I'm currently playing the Batman Arkham Asylum game, and the first screen has close to a dozen licensee logos for various tech like SpeedTree and so on - each of those was presumably a license cost that saved on development time but added to the bottom line.

 

[AlNom]

A few of those licensees for Batman are related to the Unreal Engine Integrated Partners Program, though I'm not sure what that entails...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

GTA4 has several hours of licensed music. They also have a cast of several dozen characters with a lot of voice, although it's not that far beyond other games.

The city itself is huge however, and a lot of assets had to be created for all those buildings, cars, characters and so on... and there are a LOT of missions and other content. The game's just huge.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

GTA4 has several hours of licensed music. They also have a cast of several dozen characters with a lot of voice, although it's not that far beyond other games.

If each of those actors got paid $1 million, that's 12% of the rumoured $100M cost. And in reality I'll be really surprised if they get anything above 5 figures. Licensed music also can't cost that much, unless R* picked some bad licenses! I'd like to see a breakdown on the budget, but surely marketing, like most of these games, is a large chunk.

 

[_phil_]

34 -35 millions for marketting ?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

$20m-$250m Average cost of next gen development 2011-2016.

That's not an average; it's a range. And a preposterous one to boot. Who the heckers is going to spend $250 million on a game? If you get 10 million sales at $60 a disc, the amount the publisher would get would likely just cover the cost of the game! And if the game prices go up, the number of buyers will go down. Maybe, at a push, episodic content created at $250 million over a period of 15 download episodes, would goggble up that much money on a single product.

Which doesn't explain anything about the average cost next gen. I imagine it'll be not much different to this gen, because if spending more doesn't yield more returns, no-one will do it. Even if the hardware is capable of rendering assets that took $100 million to make, it'll only get to show $20 million of assets because that's all anyone will spend. A lot will depend on growth of the gaming market and how factured it becomes. Corporate budgets on the whole will be better invested across multiple diverse titles across diverse platforms, rather than blown on a couple of epic titles.

 

[Acert93]

One thing to consider looking forward is that a lot of base assets are created at very high quality levels already (for normal maps and parallax maps). e.g. Take Gears of War and toss in a better renderer and use higher quality assets (from the same source) and your cost isn't up significantly.

 

[assen]

Over on GAF I believe Fafalada has commented that Japanese studios have managed to keep budgets more or less the same for HD titles -- not sure if it was speculation or if he has inside info. Not entirely surprising considering how simple lower-profile Japanese HD games are.

Yeah, and it can be argued that they have also managed to lose a huge chunk of their relevancy. Just look at the Metacritic Top 100 for PS2 and PS3, for example.

 

[obonicus]

Yeah, and it can be argued that they have also managed to lose a huge chunk of their relevancy. Just look at the Metacritic Top 100 for PS2 and PS3, for example.

But it's the way to keep niche genres (like RPGs that aren't Final Fantasy) going. And I'm not sure how healthy the western ideal of trying for a home run every time is.