Xbox Live Game Development Costs On The Rise

[Shawn Andrich]

Xbox Live Game Development Costs On The Rise

Jeff Tunnel, a game maker from Garage Games, discussed the rising costs of developing Live Arcade titles and what independent studios can expect to spend on game development.

"Creating an XBLA game is taking most studios 6-12 months. Costs are currently ranging from $100,000 to $300,000," said Jeff Tunnel in a recent blog update [http://makeitbigingames.com/blog/?p=35]. According to Tunnel, $300,000 is not going to seem like much as the "arms race" for Xbox Live Arcade development continues. "Right now, I wouldn?t consider attempting to make an XBLA game with a $100,000 budget. Development kits and Certification (QA testing) would eat up half of that, not leaving much for the actual game development," he said.

Garage Games recently partnered [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.34307] with Microsoft on the XNA Game Studio Express system, which is supposed to allow anyone to create games for the console and potentially reach an audience through Xbox Live. "It's our first step of creating a YouTube for video games," Peter Moore said during the announcement. "It will give you everything you need to bring your game to life on Xbox 360."

Tunnel completes his article with a comment about the odds of getting your game onto Xbox Live. "Like I explained in my earlier article about the bar raising in the XBLA360 arena, slot approvals are getting hard to get. In fact, I liken XBLA360 slots to the ?Golden Ticket? in Willy Wonka. If you get one, you are set!"

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[Goofonian]

I don't think anyone will find this all that surprising.
If microsoft is going to keep the quality of live arcade high then they are only going to allow the best games in and with arcade becoming so popular, the quality of said best titles will also be going up and up. It's still a lot cheaper to make a AAA arcade title than to make a full blown AAA console title.

 

[Incommunicado]

The problem is not the quality required to have a game admitted to XBox live arcade. Many indie teams are capable of producing top quality, innovative games. But once again, due to the enourmous interest in publishing arcade titles, pitching your title to Microsoft has become tremendoulsy difficult, if you are not well known in the industry. Look at the latest arcade releases. Most of the games are ports from old platforms with license owners beeing big publishers (see Konami flooding the arcade). I haven't seen innovative games on the service for the last few months. I had high hopes for the service to be a creative momentum for developers but it currently seems more like a recycling plant for large publishers and their ancient licenses. This is in my opinion even worse than the amount of sequels released in the regular games market, since these old licenses are not even reprogrammed to employ new assets or gameplay elements but are rather plainly emulated.
It is a shame that live arcade at the moment does not seem to become the breeding ground of innovation that so many indie developers expected and wished it to be.

 

[Russ Pitts]

There's also the "problem" of cross-platform licensing. I spoke with Chris Early from Microsoft Casual at AGC this year and he indicated that they're now asking developers and publishers of Live games to work cross-platform licensing and coding into the front end of development, so that Microsoft can offer the same game across the spectrum of its Live Anywhere offerings. Meaning you'd be able to play the same game on any of your multiple Live-enabled devices.

Trick is, this automatically increases development costs as you're now developing (essentially) multiple games simultaneously. Or you're giving up a percentage of your licensing fee for somebody else's port of the game. It's not clear what the upside is for developers here, since the pricing models haven't been tacked down and there's no way of knowing what demand might be, but if Microsoft is certain enough about this course of action to spill it in an interview, then you'd better believe they're going through with it.