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Cost of Game Development is 'Crazy' Says EA
GamesIndustry.biz has the word from Alan Tascan, general manager of EA's Montreal studio, who has gone on record saying that development costs are 'crazy' in this next-gen world. From the article: "When asked whether he'd agree that it's larger companies like EA which are driving bigger game budgets, Tascan replied, 'I think a lot of [other companies] are spending even more money. It's people who want that, it's not EA per se ... I said to some of the guys here, "The gamer is not buying lines of code; you have to promise him enough entertainment for him to put his hand in his pocket and buy the game." It's a lot of money, so you need to give him a show, and we're just here to deliver the show.'"
You think it's pricey to make games? I have to pay $699 for the console to play them!
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
The cost of game development has skyrocketed over the last thirty years. In the last ten years or so (the period during which I have actually been paying attention), I'd say that it's arguable just how much benefit this has produced for the game industry or their customers.
Maybe they should be focusing on making the games fun to play, instead of entertaining to watch?
Canthros
Licensing.
I agree with you. Most movies do cost more to produce. Some would say that movies are mass-marketed to a wider audience. However, everyone has heard that the games industry is second in sales only to porn. They beat the music and the movie industries. Such is the cost of stardom - if your business is big it's going to cost more to play. People know you're making money hand over fist and they're going to want a piece of that pie. And once you're required to meet and exceed expectations, quality is going to have to increase as well, which costs money. I say shut up and make a decent game. They finally reduced the size of packaging and digital distribution is on the horizon - hell it's already here. That will save them a boatload of money.
...to the leagues, team names, and players EVERY YEAR so that nobody else can use the player's actual name or the team's name in their games is maybe one of the reasons their games cost so much? Hmmmm? ;)
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"EA fits both categories, they have highly experimental games coming from studios they own like Maxis."
That's a pretty serious oversimplification. EA bought Maxis, and then tried to kill The Sims. Any "highly experimental" game that comes out of EA is an accident, not an experiment.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The gentleman from EA is right to blame consumers for the cost problem. We like to buy expensive-looking games even if they turn out to be not all that fun. Game design has taken a back seat to shelf appeal, and we've done it to ourselves. Meanwhile, high profile games are becoming less and less fun to play. How many FPS games do we really need? You might as well slap a "100% recycled content" sticker on every game sold in the US.
How much money does it actually cost to develop a fun game? Contrast that with costs of licensing movie characters or (worse) putting your entire production staff on the task of reworking animations for yet another Madden sequel. I'd argue that the real cost here is risk. Rather than assemble a number of small teams to make a bizarre game that could turn into a franchise, EA opts (more and more often) to play it safe by spending scads of cash on a sure thing.
Then again, maybe he's pining for the old days when he could order up a cash cow sequel much cheaper.
Either way, the next time you throw down your controler in dusgust at that $50 worth of deja vu you just purchased, we have only ourselves to blame.
Trust me, it takes just as long to re-factor and "fix" legacy code that's been hacked and re-hacked for years as it does to write it from scratch. Speaking from experience here, the iterative nature of titles like Madden and FIFA leads to a more difficult, bloated production cycle than you'd expect. Think about it -- You're a new developer working on a project and you get handed a library of code that's been 'resused' and 'modified' under 'tight time constraints' (aka "hacked") for YEARS. You have to spend time familiarizing yourself with this spaghetti mess, and as such, your productivity declines. Your managers see this occuring across the board and throw more people at the problem. Now you have four or five people who are unfamiliar with the project working on it, adding in their modifications, and making their own 'modifications' under 'tight time constraints' (aka "hacks"). What do you think ends up happening the next year when a whole new batch of people are thrown onto the project? I'd suggest turning to your dog-eared copies of The Mythical Man-Month before you attempt to divy exactly what is going on behind the scenes at EA, and probably a lot more of the bigger developers out there. The cost of game development gets "crazy" because these huge companies are falling into the common trap where they've become convinced that the answer to any development problem is "MORE RESOURCES." The concept of working in a streamlined environment has long since been abandoned in favor of a "big business" mentality where the whole somehow is percieved as greater than the sum of the parts.