EA Says Game Development Budgets Have Peaked

Gamasutra reports on comments from Electronic Arts VP David Demartini indicating that the company thinks AAA game development budgets are not going to continue their skyward trend. "If [a developer] happens to make a lot of money based on that budget, great for them. If they come up short and have to cover some of it — y'know, they'll be smarter the next time they do it. That's kind of the approach that we take to it." Certainly this has something to do with a few major economic flops in the games industry lately, such as the cancellation of This Is Vegas after an estimated $50 million had been dumped into the project. Another example is the anemic response to APB, an MMO with a budget rumored to be as high as $100 million. Poor sales and reviews caused developer Realtime Worlds to enter insolvency and lay off a large portion of the development team.

Comments

Re:Bout time...

[DNS-and-BIND]

Gamers will not play a game with anything less than brilliant graphics. It will get savaged in the reviews and everyone will dump on it. A tiny minority will defend it as a great game but the company who made it won't make any money. You think gamers spend thousands of dollars on top-end graphics cards just to play games that don't stress their equipment? The answer is no. But make a game with great graphics and reviewers will sing, gamers will buy, and the company will rake in tons of money. As long as the gameplay is barely adequate, and in a pinch you can do without that, too. It's happened plenty of times.