How exactly are development costs increasing?

[nwo504]

It seems to me that the only thing improving in most of these games are the graphics. What makes making a game in hd that much more expensive to make than a last gen game?

[Garfunkel]

It's not just HD. there are many aspects of game development that cost devs more money and time.

1/ complicated CPU/GPU archetectures: In CELL/XeCPU, programming is made far more difficult, simultaniously handling many threads and processes can tax devs lots of time and force them to re-learn concepts to apply them to the new hardware.

2/ Demand: Simply put, gamers want more from their games now a days then they ever had before, better graphics/sound/gameplay/story all take time and talent to create, for example; two different games could have wildly different costs if they were both the same but one had more advanced graphics.

3/ Market: with a larger gamer audience then ever before, devs want a bigger slice of the pie and try to appeal to more gamers, this costs a lot in spent revenue that could otherwise be used to fund something else.

4/ Dev tools: Dev tools are very poor for all consoles, they simply are not keeping up with the advancements made by the hardware architectures. On top of this, the support offered to devs working with these tools is also very poor. It doesn't matter which platform you work on; Sony/Nintendo/MS, they don't have tools which devs would love.

5/ Time: Perhaps one of the biggest culprits of dev costs rising, for a game to be made now days, it takes far more time with a far larger team, in all stages of development, graphic design, data entry, story writing, engine etc. It is not uncommon for a game today to take 4 years of development.

There are many more things effecting game dev costs but these are just a few.

[Danji Ikari]

Mostly artists. More environments and more details (polygons/better textures) on said environments take a lot more artists and thusly more man-hours (which, of course, equals money.)

I find a few of the points in Garfunkel's explanation asinine, such as "appeal." How does that affect cost at all? To make a game that appeals to more people does not cost more money it takes better strategy and sometimes dilution of the products integrity.

From what I hear from CPI it's almost completely the artists that the increase in budget is spent on.

[yoshaw]

I find a few of the points in Garfunkel's explanation asinine, such as "appeal." How does that affect cost at all? To make a game that appeals to more people does not cost more money it takes better strategy and sometimes dilution of the products integrity.

Aren't you stretching that point of his a lil too much? I thought the overall meaning of the word appeal was surrounding the notion of Marketing. Which obviously requires a portion of budget associated with the game itself. So 'appeal' from Garfunkel's post was strictly geared towards the costs concerning with the money that's spent on marketing. Sorry if I misunderstood your post.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

Yeah it's mostly art assets. Which...bodes kinda well for me when I start looking for jobs.

Except CG Modeling is tedious as shit and I hope I don't end up doing that to get my foot in the door.

[Zer0-Sum]

You too LaLiLuLeLo2003? I am graduating in about six months with my Bachelors in Game Art and Design. What package do you use? We use Maya here at my school. Though I have to say I love modeling myself, and texturing too. The new version of Maya is really great. I love the fact that the demand for good art assets is going through the roof. It is an exciting time to be in the Industry for sure.

So yah, back on topic. It is mostly the artists that suck up the dough. Higher res models take longer to detail. Even using ZBrush takes time, though it can be faster to make Normal Maps. If you making awesome looking cars in Gran Turismo or a fierce dragon in Oblivion, it all adds up to siting in front of a computer for huge amounts of hours. Salaries add up FAST. And then a company might even have to relie on contractors if they get behind schedule. That can cost a lot. Millions and millions of dollars. It is crazy to even comprehend how much cash gets spent for us to have fun. It is truly mind boggling.

[PSXBatou]

I read somewhere that the next gen systems (360 and PS3) cost somewhere around 15 million USD on average per title. That is a lot of cash.

[Zer0-Sum]

I read somewhere that the next gen systems (360 and PS3) cost somewhere around 15 million USD on average per title. That is a lot of cash.

Actually it more like 20-40 million per AAA title, on average at least, from what I understand of the Industry of course.

[Garfunkel]

What package do you use?

Blender FTW!

[Zer0-Sum]

Blender FTW!

I would love to see company actually make a full PS3 game with Blender. I have read and heard a lot about it, but have never used it. Too much time mastering ZBrush and Maya. I have great CGI movies made with it that is for sure.

[PSXBatou]

I would love to see company actually make a full PS3 game with Blender. I have read and heard a lot about it, but have never used it. Too much time mastering ZBrush and Maya. I have great CGI movies made with it that is for sure.

I prefer Maya personally.

[Garfunkel]

Maya's cool, it's just blender is open source, and to me, that means a lot, they are both great.

also, i like blender's UI.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

I just learned how to use Maya. I'm a 2D art guy myself, down with the concept art side of things, and illustrating.. But yeah I just learned maya last semester and it took me more than half the semester to do my last project, model a character. Most people went the cartoony route I modelled a realistic person, first time trying. Weeeeeeeeee. It turned out well but it's so time consuming I didn't even get to rig him with his skeleton and animate him, which I know how to do though.

[Garfunkel]

^yeah, i've just fiddled around with modeling a bit for the last few months, it's interesting but i agree, time consuming and tedious.

*realises how far off topic we have gone*

[PSXBatou]

Maya's cool, it's just blender is open source, and to me, that means a lot, they are both great.

also, i like blender's UI.

Maya PLE (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=7695485) is free and has most all the features that the paid version has. So long as you are using it for personal reasons and not for commercial ones it would be as good as open source to a certain degree. I personally bought Maya as i use it for commercial reasons, but i learned Maya on their PLE version.

I would even allow people here to use some custom palettes, shaders, and textures I made so long as they gave me credit in their work.

[Garfunkel]

thanks for the link! gonna try it now!

[Gegenki]

Blender wont be used in a game till they allow baking of subsurfacing.
The last thing I made in blender used subsurfacing. It was a plane. It looked cool but as soon as you take it out of blender it wouldnt look like much.

These days young developers probably need more money to pay off university debts!!

[Viper]

Here is an example of the difference in game development in the past 51 years.

Mortal Kombat was made by 4 guys for $50,000.00.

Games last gen needed well over 100 people and between $500,000 and $1,000,000.00 depending on the system of development just for average titles.

[cpiasminc]

From what I hear from CPI it's almost completely the artists that the increase in budget is spent on.
Yep. Considering that in the NES era, you could have a single artist create a character from start to finish in a day or two including all the polish, and now it takes a team of four artists about 3 months to make one major character not including polishing, and a lot of animation tweaks are done over the course of the entire development cycle as new ideas and such are worked in. Think of the fact that the original Prince of Persia game fit on a *double* density floppy (720k), and now the Prince by himself takes up some 10-12 MB of content on the PS2 (most of which is likely animations).

The more powerful the hardware, the bigger the shoes to fill, and that means more content. I suppose if the public expected nothing from the new hardware, maybe this wouldn't be true, but each advancement from somewhere out there becomes more to throw into the soup.

also, i like blender's UI.
I happen to like Blender's UI, too... and a big part of the reason I use it at home is because of my ancient machine -- Blender actually runs pretty smoothly on it and has a pretty small memory footprint. Whereas, at work, even with 2 GB of RAM, Maya occasionally runs out of memory with some of our levels (levels bigger than some 300 MB or so).

However, what Blender lacks for real game development purposes is third-party tools support. Maya has plenty to go around. I'd like to see nVidia/ATI tools packages and things like Turtle and Mental Ray all plug into Blender. For that matter, also a nice API to roll your own plugins and export/import tools and script functionality. Certainly, what Blender has is much leaner than the Maya or MAX APIs, but it's also rather disorganized and limited as well.

Games last gen needed well over 100 people and between $500,000 and $1,000,000.00 depending on the system of development just for average titles.
I don't know about "well over 100" for last gen, but such teams existed in the gigantic companies like EA and Square. And $500,000-$1,000,000 is kinda below average, though the games in that cost range were the definitive majority. Most games that had cost figures like this were "B" games, and those definitely had small teams (10-20 people). I knew some guys who'd done previous work on things like Barbie and Mary Kate/Ashley games who saw figures in this range. Including all the AAA through B titles and everything in between and throwing out really exceptional cases like sleeper hits and unnaturally long dev cycles or things that had enormous licensing fees (e.g. GT4), I'd put averages somewhere around $2,500,000 per game, and a team size of around 25 people for a dev cycle of 2 years or so.

AAA titles in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era easily went over $10,000,000 -- I expect the average next-gen game to be in around here by the end of it all. A handful out there went over $40,000,000, but those I consider exceptional.

[Smokey]

A handful out there went over $40,000,000, but those I consider exceptional.
gtfoh no shit!! what games hit that mark on ps2/xbox/GC or are you talkin ps3/360?

[cpiasminc]

gtfoh no shit!! what games hit that mark on ps2/xbox/GC or are you talkin ps3/360?
Well, in that era, at least, Half-life 2 was quoted as having a $40 million+ price tag and that was the data about 6 months prior to its initial release on the PC. GT4 also came pretty close to if not crossed that mark, though a very significant chunk of their costs was licensing fees to actually feature real cars and tracks. I can't even begin to imagine how much more expensive it might have been had they supported damage models.

Other examples of just otherwise unnaturally expensive development costs, though not quite in that league... Guitar Hero was extremely expensive mainly in creating (and getting approval for) a new peripheral for the PS2 and in licensing all those songs. I wouldn't be surprised if half their budget was paid to lawyers.

I remember at a seminar, someone said that Halo ran a good $12 million at the time (not including the PC port), and they were at the time, expecting Halo 2 to be at least $18... and if I'm to believe the speaker, that was just development costs, not including marketing costs.

[jaxmkii]

GT4 was a 40+ million game

[Smokey]

Well, in that era, at least, Half-life 2 was quoted as having a $40 million+ price tag and that was the data about 6 months prior to its initial release on the PC. GT4 also came pretty close to if not crossed that mark, though a very significant chunk of their costs was licensing fees to actually feature real cars and tracks. I can't even begin to imagine how much more expensive it might have been had they supported damage models.

Other examples of just otherwise unnaturally expensive development costs, though not quite in that league... Guitar Hero was extremely expensive mainly in creating (and getting approval for) a new peripheral for the PS2 and in licensing all those songs. I wouldn't be surprised if half their budget was paid to lawyers.

I remember at a seminar, someone said that Halo ran a good $12 million at the time (not including the PC port), and they were at the time, expecting Halo 2 to be at least $18... and if I'm to believe the speaker, that was just development costs, not including marketing costs.
there we go people the reason for no crash damage!!! good enough for me

[venomv]

I thought that is what they said.....Car companies don't want their cars all smashed up, and the obvious solution is more money. And that is a lot of comapnies to pay and a lot of cars to pay for....