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EA Says Game Development Budgets Have Peaked

Posted by Soulskill on from the nowhere-to-go-but-down dept.

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.

2 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Bout time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Lots of money does not a good game make...

    Bring back innovative fun gameplay and stop pushing graphics!

    Crappy games with awesome graphics... Are still crappy games.
       

    1. Re:Bout time... by kurokame · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Gamers will not play a game with anything less than brilliant graphics.

      Nintendo would probably beg to differ with you, but they're too busy rolling in piles of cash.

      A game can be visually compelling without being photorealistic or whatever, it's just that photorealism is easier to buy than creativity. In most cases, this leads to rather predictable decisions by game producers, especially given that they're waging rather large up-front budgets against possible payoffs several years down the road.

      The truly tragic part here is that making the product visually compelling through artistic means rather than through uber-high polygon counts will be compelling more or less forever, while the high polygon count game will necessarily be using technology that is several years old by the time it gets to market. It's a losing game which only works at all because you're competing against other companies with the same problems which are making the same mistakes.

      So it's not really that gamers won't accept anything else. Yeah, it does have its uses as a selling point. But it's more about market dynamics than gamer preferences.