Razor Blade Games?

Oxygen99 writes "There's a story on the BBC News website regarding the financial impact on game developers of the next generation of consoles. The article states that while the cost of producing games increases exponentially as new technology comes online, consumer prices stay approximately the same, leading to an unsustainable financial environment for many small developers. With many small development teams already hurting from the crippling costs of development for the X-Box, GameCube and PlayStation 2, what happens when the X-Box2 or Playstation 3 arrives? Are the days of small scale game development over? Will we ever see a new Jeff Minter? Will the games industry go down the route of the razor manufacturers where consoles are almost given away with the games?"

Comments

Golden age died along time ago

[msgmonkey]

The days of the 8-bit micro was the golden era when it came to small developers(otherwise known as geeks in bed-rooms/garages/basements). You'd have the same person doing the coding, graphics and sound and still have something that did n't look amaturish compared to the big guys. You just cant do that these days, and especially so because graphics and sound have much more prominence then playability did back in the day.

I still remember those 1.99 games being available at my local newsagent. Ahh let the nostalgia begin :)

Nintendo is confronting this

[GweeDo]

Nintendo has feared that this was coming since they decided to create the Gamecube. They saw that more and more we are only getting sequal's and games with a Disney license since they are a sure fire seller. In response to this the former President of Nintendo (the mighty and wise Hiroshi Yamauchi) started a little project called the QFund. It has multiple purpose's, but one of them is to promote the idea of less expensive development (Nintendo has been doing numerous internal things to drop their production costs). The QFund has a few restrictions on it that help to this point. First of all any project gets money from QFund must finish the game in one year. If they go past that point they can loss funding. They also must use GBA connectivity. Some might claim that is a gimmick to get more people using that for Nintendo, but some of us believe this could actually lead to some real innovations :P

Re:Consoles are already given out

[nelsonal]

XBoxes are still sold at a loss (remember that retailers do make a profit on those units figure MS gets less than $150 per X-box). I'd guess that the cost of a unit is around $200, it was $300+ when introduced. The whole program, including games sales (which are quite profitable) generated almost $1 billion in losses for MS this year (ending in June). Many consoles are sold at a loss initially, since the manufacturer knows that eating a few months of losses might give them a year of profits on the back end, when a better console might still be sold, so they tend to pack the best stuff they think they can resonably get away with at the time.