Ubisoft CEO: Next-Gen Games Will Cost Triple to Make

[Max_A_Buck]

As much as I hate to say it, if a game is pretty, I'll try to like it. If it looks god awful then it's going to want to be one of the most engaging games of all time or I simply won't be able to get into it. I'm not sure why, it's just the way I am.

I'm agreeing with devs "putting the brakes on" and realizing that just throwing money at games won't necessarily make them excellent. That said, I'm forever grateful for all advancements with graphics and so on.

As far as consoles go I'd say PS2 is going good still because it would be so cheap to develop games for. Thus making the games cheaper for the consumer and appealing to those who don't wanna pay $100(AUD) for a shiny PS3 game.

The Wii still has last-gen graphics and so is most likely just as cheap to develop for as PS2. So that might stick around for a bit - until the next generation probably.

The 360 would have to be getting reasonable to develop for by now judging by all the smaller titles being made for it. Kind of like this generation's PS2, if you will. Mind you, I'm not sure how much life it has in it. I hope it's a while but then who knows for sure.

The PS3. Well. I'd say it'll start to see some glory when they drop prices. As I consider myself an average consumer - I'm not willing to buy a PS3 (40GB/Second hand) off EB Games for $500(AUD). However, once there's a few really, really good titles and it drops a bit in price, I'll certainly go and get one. I feel a knee-jerk reaction will be more games being made for it. And I really hope I'm right.

 

[dochmbi]

I think what needs to happen is for developers to create a pool of materials (textures and models and such stuff) which they can share.

 

[Low Key]

Wait a minute Ubisoft. Big budget movies have a big budget because at least half the cost is going to the salaries of the actors. There is no need for that in a video game. And even the bad movies still turn a decent profit within the first year.

There is no need to speculate the future market. If games cost $100 each, no one will buy them, simple as that.

 

[hypothetical fact]

Wait a minute Ubisoft. Big budget movies have a big budget because at least half the cost is going to the salaries of the actors. There is no need for that in a video game. And even the bad movies still turn a decent profit within the first year.

There is no need to speculate the future market. If games cost $100 each, no one will buy them, simple as that.

They do in Australia, heck I paid $115 for prototype.

 

[Low Key]

Wait a minute Ubisoft. Big budget movies have a big budget because at least half the cost is going to the salaries of the actors. There is no need for that in a video game. And even the bad movies still turn a decent profit within the first year.

There is no need to speculate the future market. If games cost $100 each, no one will buy them, simple as that.

They do in Australia, heck I paid $115 for prototype.

Okay, so they will in Australia, but they won't in America. Hell, I don't even buy brand new games now because of the price tag. I don't have that kind of money to spend.

 

[bkd69]

There's a reason that The Sims is the biggest selling computer game ever. If The Sims ran like crap on Intel's POS onboard graphics chip that every $300 Dell Dimension uses, like most other games, it would never have earned that title. You lament the rise of casual gaming in the PC gaming space? Consider their graphics requirement versus, say CoD4, frex.

Likewise, as noted upthread, the PS2 remains a viable target platform, because in addition to to having development costs fully amortized many years ago on the developers' side, consumers still deem it Good Enough, graphicswise.

On the other hand, Shadow of the Colussus.

 

[wwjdftw]

when i saw the artice all i could think of was

Bull, Fucking, Shit

and my opinion still stands, something like a game would not cost 60 million dollars to produce, and the consoles that are going to "cost so damn much" arn't even here yet

 

[Sixties Spidey]

Well, I can take comfort in the fact that indie developers will be the future of videogames.

 

[ChromeAlchemist]

Hell even if it does get a 10 he'll say it deserves an 11. I'm really happy he's suspended right now so we have no fear of him, thanks Necro!

This came at a price though, because Swanson's not coming back. See for yourself.

 

[ChromeAlchemist]

Well, I can take comfort in the fact that indie developers will be the future of videogames.

If big budget graphics are the order of the day, indie devs won't be able to give that to the people. They will however be able to give the people some original ideas, so it may come to a point where people have to choose.

EDIT: Sorry double post.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

All the more reason to no upgrade to the new hardware and design systems until its cost are in range of reasonable profits..... drop games down to the 20-30 range first. Its not like things don't suck from all the rushing and cost cutting measures already.

 

[Jumplion]

I don't think you get the nature of the costs involved.
And quite frankly, graphics is an area of diminishing returns. Going from 1500 polygons to 1 million is a huge jump. From 1 million to 2? Not so much.

Most of the effects used in a CGI movie can be faked (or new techniques are devised to do so.) - The fake is maybe 90% of the quality, but it can easily be 1000 times faster to do.
CGI movies of course, keep getting more elaborate, so we will probably not catch up for a long time.

But all this is immaterial.
Why does it cost more to develop, say, Crysis than it did to develop Goldeneye?

Not because of the engine.
It's because of the artwork.

When your development team goes from being 20 people to being 200, THAT is where the cost comes from.

You can show it with simple maths:
20 people getting $50,000 a year for 2 years = $1,000,000
200 people getting $50,000 a year for 2 years = $10,000,000

It's paying all the extra artists needed to put in all the additional details that cause this, NOT needing a better engine, or more powerful hardware.

But that's assuming that the only thing you can do with CGI and better graphics is pushing the amount of pixels and polygons and interestingly enough it's not. There are so many extra topics that flow into this, but I'll restrain myself by listing a few; Animations could greatly improve connection with the player and character, interaction with the environment, dialouge, the deteails within the gameplay, if characters could move fluidly like actual people and express like humans then that would greatly improve interaction with characters.

When a team focuses alot on the graphics/visuals, the effort they use on the graphics seeps into the other aspects of the game and them everything is detailed and polished ala Killzone 2. I can't speak for Crysis, and this doesn't happen all the time, but like I said before; when improved graphics/visuals come along everything else comes with the territory.

Nobody said it was going to be easy or cheap or sucessful because obviously it's not. But if/when Killzone 2 graphics become a standard in the future (which I wouldn't be surprised at least some time in the future) wouldn't you think that those visuals would be a lot more cheap than now?

 

[mattttherman3]

This is why I think making all games downloadable is bullshit, I don't buy every game that comes out, I rent most of them, besides, people are less likely to steal a game disk from me, rather than an online account.

 

[Sewer Rat]

That's it! Time to go back to 8-Bit!

 

[Zer_]

I don't think you get the nature of the costs involved.
And quite frankly, graphics is an area of diminishing returns. Going from 1500 polygons to 1 million is a huge jump. From 1 million to 2? Not so much.

Most of the effects used in a CGI movie can be faked (or new techniques are devised to do so.) - The fake is maybe 90% of the quality, but it can easily be 1000 times faster to do.
CGI movies of course, keep getting more elaborate, so we will probably not catch up for a long time.

But all this is immaterial.
Why does it cost more to develop, say, Crysis than it did to develop Goldeneye?

Not because of the engine.
It's because of the artwork.

When your development team goes from being 20 people to being 200, THAT is where the cost comes from.

You can show it with simple maths:
20 people getting $50,000 a year for 2 years = $1,000,000
200 people getting $50,000 a year for 2 years = $10,000,000

It's paying all the extra artists needed to put in all the additional details that cause this, NOT needing a better engine, or more powerful hardware.

But that's assuming that the only thing you can do with CGI and better graphics is pushing the amount of pixels and polygons and interestingly enough it's not. There are so many extra topics that flow into this, but I'll restrain myself by listing a few; Animations could greatly improve connection with the player and character, interaction with the environment, dialouge, the deteails within the gameplay, if characters could move fluidly like actual people and express like humans then that would greatly improve interaction with characters.

When a team focuses alot on the graphics/visuals, the effort they use on the graphics seeps into the other aspects of the game and them everything is detailed and polished ala Killzone 2. I can't speak for Crysis, and this doesn't happen all the time, but like I said before; when improved graphics/visuals come along everything else comes with the territory.

Nobody said it was going to be easy or cheap or sucessful because obviously it's not. But if/when Killzone 2 graphics become a standard in the future (which I wouldn't be surprised at least some time in the future) wouldn't you think that those visuals would be a lot more cheap than now?

Stop comparing the gaming industry to Movies, because I'm just going to shoot you down right now. In the gaming industry games like Peggle, The Sims and Wii Fit are the games that appeal to the wider audience. These games are not on the edge of graphical technology, far from it. When it comes to movies you have big blockbusters being directed by Micheal Bay and they make money, lots of it. Comparing both industries from an economic stand point does not work.

When we play games we are directly interacting with a piece of software. When a new flashy game comes out, it may attract a lot of initial attention, but if the interactivity part sucks then the game won't be all that successful. So we have titles like The Sims 3 setting sales records [http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/59088] and they are nothing to sneeze at when it comes to graphics. On occasion you have a game that has it all. It has gameplay, graphics and caters to a wide audience, but those games cost dozens of millions to make.

So the moral of the story is The Sims 3 doesn't look as good as Killzone 2, but it makes a lot more money.

 

[Jumplion]

Stop comparing the gaming industry to Movies, because I'm just going to shoot you down right now. In the gaming industry games like Peggle, The Sims and Wii Fit are the games that appeal to the wider audience. These games are not on the edge of graphical technology, far from it. When it comes to movies you have big blockbusters being directed by Micheal Bay and they make money, lots of it. Comparing both industries from an economic stand point does not work.

When we play games we are directly interacting with a piece of software. When a new flashy game comes out, it may attract a lot of initial attention, but if the interactivity part sucks then the game won't be all that successful. So we have titles like The Sims 3 setting sales records [http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/59088] and they are nothing to sneeze at when it comes to graphics. On occasion you have a game that has it all. It has gameplay, graphics and caters to a wide audience, but those games cost dozens of millions to make.

So the moral of the story is The Sims 3 doesn't look as good as Killzone 2, but it makes a lot more money.

But...I wasn't comparing games to movie, was I? I didn't think I did.

When you think about it though, the film business and game business are actually pretty similar. How many crappy comedy movie comedies come out and are successful? I saw "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" and thought it was absolutely horrible and a waste of $7.50 yet it earned over $180 million on a budget of $26 million and it is obviously just a random comedy full of cliches and inteligence-less...-es stuff.

Cheap cash-ins will pretty much always earn more money and attention than the real stuff (not saying Sims 3 or Peggle are crap or cash-ins, I'm speaking in general terms here) but that doesn't mean that the intellectual, and actually good, movies are shunned. Not everyone wants a souless comedy, some people want a good movie to watch that isn't just fart jokes and fat guys flabbing around. This is where documentaries and "based on a true story" movies come from, and many of them are successful (if holywood-ized most of the time).

Why aren't games alowed to be something other than mindless "fun"? Games with crazy over-the-top action and are tried and tired franchises, along with cheap $5 games to pick up and play, will near always sell more than thouroughly worked out and polished games to give more of an experience in itself. Psychonauts, ICO, Shadow of the Collosus, Okami, all of those games were loved by near everyone who played it but they just didn't sell which is a shame.

Does this mean that games should go for it? Why can't games try something different, Heavy Rain is trying to intergrate a more mature and adult story with gameplay, and if it means sacrificing a bit on the gameplay side I say go for it. It just means that the next game to come along and be another Heavy Rain can refine on the previous iteration and continue to improve on what Heavy Rain did not (assuming Heavy Rain succeeds and does what it's supposed to, which I pray to GOD that it does).

EDIT: And reviewing a bit over your post, I think you miseed my point near completely. I'm not saying that Killzone 2 should sell more because it has graphics. The Sims 3 isn't targeted at the audience that Killzone 2 is, they're completely different.

Nobody is saying that making these kinds of game is cheap and easy, they're extremely expensive and hard to make of course! But because they're expensive that means that we shouldn't bother to improve on anything.....because it's hard? Because it's slightly expensive? Well tough noggies, as long as people keep dreaming and have visions of the future of gaming, developers are going to want to keep on pushing and pushing and pushing the limit of whatever they can do no matter how expensive it is. They may be successful, they may not be, but the important thing is that they're trying and making the neccessary risks to improve the games they make.

 

[Zer_]

****Snipped****

Then the industry needs to find ways to cut costs in development or it's in for a load of shit. It's not some myth that games are becoming more expensive to make, it's a fact. The Movie industry hasn't had that same diminishing return when it comes to money spent. In the earlier days of movie production having large effects were actually more expensive because they had to blow up real cars or detailed mock-ups as opposed to having them generated by CG.

Investors are always reluctant to fund huge gaming projects. LucasArts funded The Force Unleashed and ended up with a massive money pit. They got to the point where their game wasn't finished, and putting more money into the project would bring people into debt, so they had no choice but to release in incomplete game. This is a huge issue in the gaming industry. We're seeing incomplete games released very often.

A lot of developers may not admit it but a staggering sum of the games released today don't even live up to what the developers had intended to make. The major point of my post was to say that in gaming graphics alone cannot stand on its own no matter what market you go for. In movies there is a market for eyegasms.

In the end, Mr. Ubisoft is right. He may be off on his figures, who knows. The trend is that games are becoming too expensive to make. The next logical step for platform developers will be to shift the focus more onto the developers as opposed to the consumer. The developers will need to find ways to cut costs and reduce the workload required to deliver visually appealing games.

In the 90s developers would ask "What can I do with this hardware?"
In the new century developers are asking "What can I do with these funds?"

 

[Jumplion]

In the 90s developers would ask "What can I do with this hardware?"
In the new century developers are asking "What can I do with these funds?"

I beg to differ, game developers nowadays are still thinking "what can I do with this hardware?".

Anywhere from "We're pushing the 360 to the limits!" to "The PS3 gives us so much freedom with everything!" to "The Wii provides a unique experience that our team is capatilizing on" is proof enough that developers are still trying to exploit the hardware they're using to make better experiences for their games.

Is it expensive? Hell yes. Is it hard? Hell yes x 2. Is it risky? Hell yes^2. But video games are much more flexible, much younger, and much more risky than any movie could ever be. You can do things in a video game that no movie could ever do in 100 years, but that does come at the cost that you have detailed.

This also comes to the fact that video games aren't a widely socially acceptable form of media and is instead bashed by much of the media itself. Thinking about it a bit, I think the problem you're detailing will continue with some more gusto until video games are accepted as entertaiment/art/whatever so people are more comfortable with taking less risks, but now I'm just rambling and thinking random thoughts in my head.

But overall it is a problem, I agree, but I hardly think a single thing has changed in the 90s to today in terms of technology pushing.

 

[Zer_]

In the 90s developers would ask "What can I do with this hardware?"
In the new century developers are asking "What can I do with these funds?"

I was making this statement more from a standpoint within the developing industry and not things that would be said to the public. Hardware is always a consideration and a limitation, but funding being a limitation is a more recent side of gaming. Back in the mid 90s there was no such thing as an indie developer because it really didn't cost nearly as much to make a good game.

Relic entertainment had ~20 people employed just after Homeworld 1 was released. That number went to over 100 by the time Homeworld 2 neared release.

The negative stigma following video games does have an impact, and we will eventually get out of that phase, but we need to get around it for the time being. Until investors are willing to consistently invest 40+ million in big games we'll have to figure out ways to cut costs.

 

[The Political Gamer]

So games for the PS4 and the Xbox 720 will be 69.99, great. >_>