Dev Costs Have "Doubled" Since Last-gen

Though the games market continues to grow defiantly, dev costs are growing faster.

That was the underlying conflict expressed by Robert Walsh, CEO of indie giant Krome.

Walsh states that, while the games press are largely supportive of the industry's encouraging performance, to a certain extent it is overlooking the fact that dev budgets are rising rapidly.

"I think that's one thing that the press, to a certain extent, is forgetting," said Walsh in an interview with Develop.

[Shnazzyone]

guess that's the issue with HD games. It takes alot of resources to make the pretty eye candy happen. That's why PS3 will have trouble gettinmg developers because of the low return for everything but the biggest and brightest titles. Maybe if PS3 ended up the #1 console like all the kids wanted it would be different.

In retrospect it was quite smart of nintendo to max out the standard def system for this gen. Sure it lowers development costs signifigantly.

[soxfan2005]

This is the main reason that exclusives are becoming fewer are far between. How can developers make a profit if they limit their potential audience to just owners of one console? MS and Sony can subsidize their exclusive developers for now, but at what point will it simply become too expensive to pay to keep a game or franchise exclusive?

10-15 years ago, in the PS1/Saturn/N64 era, nearly all games were exclusive - maybe 10-15% were multi-platform. That number increased to close to 50% in the PS2/Xbox/Gambecube era. Now, about 80% of games are multi-platform between (at least between PS3 and Xbox 360). This number will continue to rise as development costs continue to skyrocket. It will simply make no financial sense to limit a game's potential audience to 20 or 30 million people, when it could be 50+ million. Plus, the best multi-platform titles on the market have already proven that the 360 and PS3 are nearly identical performance-wise, despite the best efforts of some to prove otherwise.

[N4g_null]

I wish that number would rise but in reality it will get smaller. Hd games cost more for most gamers to buy and also there is the fact that Wii development is cheaper and can actually add more sales to your game because of the different controller experiences.

HVS is making I believe 3 games for the price of one HD game right now. They have ridicules turnarounds for their builds right now. I think you will see this will be the case for most developer that ramp back down to an SD console.

SONY recently drop the price of there SDK yet we already bought it LOL. It will still cost more to do normal maps for every thing in game, it is just more work and you need a way bigger team. Also you may find it is harder to do a new franchise on those systems when you have AAA game hovering over your head. I believe you have allen wake and some game on the xbox, heavy rain that most people will be looking for.

There needs to be more gamers playing HD games and different types also. Certain developer will have default sales because of the audience and not because of the quality. That is no good... because SONY's and MS main success is based on game sales.

Either way it is not looking good for the HD guys. The big stagnant publisher will stay on the platform because they can but other will try the Wii out to balance their bank accounts and gain new fans.

Just look at the excitement capcom has generate by supporting the Wii. Other are following and I believe the development cost will start normalizing.

Also you can use flash to make Wii games now.