Escalating costs for next-gen

It?s true that the potential cost to develop next-gen games is alarming and could possibly have a negative effect on both smaller developers and consumers, but on the other hand, maybe next-gen game development could cause ?new growth? in the industry (to use their forestry analogy) in the form of small outsourcing studios.

If there?s a stronger demand for large and time-consuming game assets, then surely there will be room for outsourcing studios to emerge to meet that demand?

I don?t think the future of game dev looks scary, just different.

I think the PSP and DS are good places for smaller companies to get there roots if the outlay is too high for next gen.
Can't see it being too much of an impact for the smaller companies, as there are those avenues for them to get a foothold.

Its the mid to larger ones who attempt next gen that could be in threat, if you shell out alot on a next gen title and it doesn't pay off you could be in for a world of hurt.

I mean, consider the amount of WWII games out there at the moment. I'm sure someone could make a lot of money by creating a large set of high quality models and textures of WW2 planes, guns, tanks, building etc and selling them to developers. Realism type games would be much easier to tackle as the art assets are based on something that already exists.

Futuristic or Fantasy games would be far more difficult as they require far more unique assets.

EA should probably get a group of high poly modellers and texture artists to wail away at reusable art asset for there developers to use. In a similar fashion as their buy out of renderware and crytech.

Even Id said they were going to reuse assets from doom 3, and why wouldn't they. It will cut the production of their next game in half.

High polygon art assets need not be as disposable as the current use low poly models, which need to be upgraded in parallel with technology.

The fact the the cost of the production of the next gen consoles is high is not wat actually scares me. it's the retail price thats gonna scare me, I was lucky to get an xbox within the firt year of release and untill halfway through septemper somtime im stuck on this crappy little 400mhz pc :(, though (palantir) was right when he said it might open up new smaller developers but most will last as much as one game before the larger companys chrush them like tiny crushable things...

i guess this is enough comment from me before u start throwing things.

I admit that as a programmer, emergent technology gives me a slight chill in the vitals, especially since as a teenager I was just finishing writing my first 8-bit game when the market crashed and went 16-bit. I guess with things as they are now there will always be the niche market (as with the film industry) which may be where smaller companies will thrive. There is that case with the film 'Independence Day' where the graphics were done by a small graphics company.

Does anyone remember the T.V commercial for Final Fantasy VII in Australia? They touted that over 200 (or was it 300?) programmers and artists worked on that game. And that was released on the PSX back in 1997! Does anyone know how many copies that game sold?

I've always wondered how Square fares with game sales considering the huge production costs that each of their games require. If there's a company that isn't worried about escalating development costs, it would be Square-Enix. They've been doing huge productions years ago! Their titles are of extremely polished quality - they've set the standard in all areas (art, soundtrack, story), and also have captured a large dedicated fanbase (females included) that will keep on buying their games, meaning that they should guarantee a good return...

I bet Square-Enix have an unbelievably huge archive of detailed assets (character models and animation, architecture, textures etc) from all their past games and the Final Fantasy movie!

Although the point of the article was that orginality is stifled, and we're getting sequels of sequels, of which Square-Enix is an example of, along with EA.

Retail prices - yeh, it's gonna be tough for a consumer to pay for a game that costs over a hundred bucks.. something has gotta give.

Well, considering all FF games were pre-rendered, square now have one of the best pool of 3D artists in the world. It still amazes me that they can have such a huge team and still make large wads of cash.

Unfortunatly sequels do make economic sence in the game industry, even more so than the movie industry.

Ok, just tacking onto this thread about escalating costs with something related...

Gamebiz.com has reported and confirmed that the [url="http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=4534"]Playstation 3 *will* use Blue-Ray discs[/url]. Explained in the article, "Blu-Ray disc technology, an evolution of the DVD format which provides six times more storage space than conventional DVD discs."

*cracks whip at content-creating artists to fill up that disc*