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Bonnell Quizzical On PSP, Development Costs Discussed
Thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for its article discussing Atari CEO Bruno Bonnell's comments on the relative mystery of Sony's PSP handheld, arguing that "there's simply not enough information available for publishers to make educated decisions about it." As for development costs for making PSP games, Bonnell cynically estimated: "From one cent to $50 million, I have no idea", suggesting that "there's no way to accurately predict costs on the device at this point." GI.Biz argues: "This is an unusual comment - because one area where Sony has not skimped is on providing development tools for the PSP to its partners", and 1UP has more informative comments from EA CEO Larry Probst at the same financial conference, commenting on PSP dev costs per game: "We're speculating that the $1-2 million range is a good estimate."
Who cares? Download the Microsoft Platform/DirectX SDKs, or install your Linux -dev packages and do whatever the funk you wanna do!
"How about something to prevent duplicate articles?"
I find it interesting that people who complain about dupes keep repeating it over and over again. Maybe you guys should get your own system in place first before you complain about the negligible impact Slashdot is having on your lives by repeating a story here and there.
"Derp de derp."
EA, Activision, and other US developers do not seem to be having the same problems he is with supporting the PSP. Even without pricing information it's strategically important to have titles on these new machines, just in case they take off - that's why most major publishers decided to put out some games for the N-Gage as well. And if Bruno Bonnell can't estimate development costs, when the technical specs of the machine are already well-known to developers, what is he doing in charge of a video game company?
Development costs will probably stabilise once the developers know how big the market is going to be.
It wouldn't suprise me if developers were going all-out for launch titles - being on the shelf at day zero right next to the brand new hardware is important to support a new machine. Once the platform has launched they can settle back when they're have more of an idea how big the market is going to be and how many titles (and the value of those titles) that the market can support.
So that's why he doesn't know - he might have an idea of what they're spending for the launch titles, but he's probably also expecting that figure to change - up or down - once the PSP launches and proves it's worth to developers.
I have heard people say this hollywood budget movie is huge, let's go see it. I have never heard people say EA spent a cazillion $$ on this game, let's go see it. It's sad that every industry is setting the quality of its product by how much freaking money they pump in to make it.
I often do deving on the GBA, and there are many, many reason someone might want to:
:)
:(
1) It's MUCH easier and more fun to program for fixed hardware. No need to worry about if the player has a keyboard / mouse (2 or 3 or 9 button?)/ joypad (and then, what joypad). Do they have good openGL support? surround sound 3d? what resolution should the game run at? (Fixing it is kind of necessary for sprite-based games, but will annoy LCD owners) etc. etc.
2) I love my GBA and I imagine I'll love the PSP. It adds fun to program for small devices. It's a new challenge (for example on the GBA you have 4 background layers and a splattering of rotatable sprites. Its very different to the PC's "graphics is just a single bitmap, redraw it each from").
3) If you want a job writing games for portable devices, there is no better thing to take to a job interview than a working game
Personally I wish that nintendo, microsoft and sony would losen up on the fan-based deving (yes microsoft will give you a directX dev set, but not a X-box one), but I doubt it will happen any time soon
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling