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[Lime]

I remember at the start of this generation developers and publishers were saying that once they've grown familiar and experienced with teh PS3/360 hardware, they'd save costs. Moreover, they also mentioned that once the first game in a series was done, it would be cheaper to produce the sequels since most assets were already created.

Yet budgets kept on rising. Dat AAA blockbuster business model, I guess :/

 

[Spongebob]

Just random AKB48 pictures.



You could certainly be right. I know Tim Sweeney had Gears of War 2's budget at 12m, and that took a lot of people by surprise.

Probably costs hidden away in the development of Unreal Engine 3.

 

[Vitor711]

Yeah, which is why I never get people who say that next gen will automatically cause budgets to rise even more.

Due to the hardware being more powerful, it'll be easier to implement many features. Thus making it cheaper to put those features into the game(s) compared to how things were previously.

This pretty much.

The jump to this gen was a huge financial leap but we won't see that happen again.

Right now developers actually have to trim back high poly models, compress high resolution textures and remove taxing elements like that which will be totally doable in next gen consoles. You'll be able to go from concept to finished design much faster without the need to scale back as much.

Of course people will be pushing things further yet again but I don't see why next gen automatically equates to bigger budgets.

 

[deviljho]

Of course people will be pushing things further yet again but I don't see why next gen automatically equates to bigger budgets.

if average budgets remain the same for the various "tiers," then you will continue to have studio closures and/or industry consolidation. and that's not good for gamers, in general.

 

[charsace]

We know some of the budget costs of games:

note: some of these games may also include marketing costs

Gears of War - officially $10 million
Gears of War 2 - officially $12 million
Red Steel 1 - officially 12.7 million
Bioshock - officially $15 million
Crackdown - officially around $20 million
Uncharted 2 - officially $20 million
Resident Evil 5- officially at least $19.3-20 million (as of May 2008)
Crysis 2 - officially $22 million
Killzone 2 - over $20 million
Assassin's Creed 2 - officially over $20 million (roughly 20% higher than AC 1)
L.A. Noire - unsure of toal cost, but significantly higher than $20 million
Lost Planet - estimated $20 million + $20 million marketing budget
God of War 3 - officially $44 million
Halo 3 - officially $55 million (includes $30 million marketing budget)
Halo 4- officially estimated $60 million without marketing costs
Gran Turismo 5 -estimated $60 - $80 million
Elder Scrolls: Skyrim - estimated $85 million (includes marketing costs)
GTA 4- estimated $100 million

Marketing budgets:

Left 4 Dead - officially $10 million
Left 4 Dead 2 - officially around $25 million

Most of these numbers are bullshit. Rockstar seems to be the only company that tells the truth. Uncharted numbers always seem to be bs to me. They do motion capture with the voice actors. No way are they doing that and everything else for 20mill total.

This pretty much.

The jump to this gen was a huge financial leap but we won't see that happen again.

Right now developers actually have to trim back high poly models, compress high resolution textures and remove taxing elements like that which will be totally doable in next gen consoles. You'll be able to go from concept to finished design much faster without the need to scale back as much.

Of course people will be pushing things further yet again but I don't see why next gen automatically equates to bigger budgets.

They still scale back a lot. The models that devs get normal maps from are 250,000+ poly models.

 

[Pachterballs]

Most of these numbers are bullshit. Rockstar seems to be the only company that tells the truth. Uncharted numbers always seem to be bs to me. They do motion capture with the voice actors. No way are they doing that and everything else for 20mill total.

pretty sure ND set up their own mocap studios.

yeah they did:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/11/behind-the-scenes-at-naughty-dogs-mocap-studio/


so that cost might have gone to ND and not the game.

Also you're complaining about ND's numbers but not gears. Epic's Gears would have had all the tech help in house but its all inhouse which kept the numbers down. They also probably didn't have to license Unreal Engine.

 

[ArtHands]

This. Yes, they have better tools/power to do the things they already could... but with all of that comes NEW things they can and eventually MUST do to compete in the AAA arena.

An example.... Real Time Lighting. Yes, it will save a lot of time/power to have those real time lights, but those lighting elements come at a cost of their own. While you save developer time, you're sacrificing power to get it. As a AAA game, it may be worthwhile to actually do FIXED lighting ala last gen, thereby saving processing power that can be applied to more lighting or more particles or more models or a ton of other things.

In that instance, the ability to do it won't speed up the process at all (except maybe for prototyping scene lighting, could still be great for that situation). It would mean more or less the same work PLUS the cost of working on those additional effects.

Even if you do say use the real time lighting and therefore spent less time on that aspect, you still have people who have to work on improved AI routines, or people who have to work on better model collision detecting, or any number of other things.

As a famous person once said, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Exactly this. People should stop thinking these are some switches where you can just turn on and the engine will do all the works for you. Things don't really work that way.

An analogy will be like a car driver who is learning how to pilot a plane. There are a lot more new switches and buttons to fumble with now and you will take times to learn how to operate them too.

 

[charsace]

pretty sure ND set up their own mocap studios.

yeah they did:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/11/behind-the-scenes-at-naughty-dogs-mocap-studio/


so that cost might have gone to ND and not the game.

Also you're complaining about ND's numbers but not gears. Epic's Gears would have had all the tech help in house but its all inhouse which kept the numbers down. They also probably didn't have to license Unreal Engine.

Pointing out ND because their development process is similar to what MS did with Halo 4 and that game was $60mill. Rockstar also has a similar process and brings in that studio for some of the animation. And I don't see Nolan North or the woman that plays Elena being cheap to bring in for motion capture. So yes, the numbers they throw out are hard to believe.

 

[Pachterballs]

Pointing out ND because their development process is similar to what MS did with Halo 4 and that game was $60mill. Rockstar also has a similar process and brings in that studio for some of the animation. And I don't see Nolan North or the woman that plays Elena being cheap to bring in for motion capture. So yes, the numbers they throw out are hard to believe.

they're not mega stars. Elena got famous after Uncharted with that haven tv show. If the new david cager can get ellen page (and now that's a name).. I don't believe the voice actors/mocap are as expensive as you'd like to make it out to be.

 

[AngmarsKing701]

Buy a PC. Wait for game to go on sale on Steam, GMG or Amazon.

 

[li bur]

I don't really have any experiences with game development, but isn't the example of The Witcher 2 and Amnesia being made with such small budget is because of the salary standard in those developer area is quite low (CDP Red is located in Poland) compared to the other AAA Games? (For instances, Bioware is located in Canada which surely have higher salary standardisation)

 

[ArtHands]

I remember at the start of this generation developers and publishers were saying that once they've grown familiar and experienced with teh PS3/360 hardware, they'd save costs. Moreover, they also mentioned that once the first game in a series was done, it would be cheaper to produce the sequels since most assets were already created.

Yet budgets kept on rising. Dat AAA blockbuster business model, I guess :/

That's true only to a certain extend though. After a title shipped and they planned a sequel, at times they will modify their pipeline just so to avoid the mistakes they had when they shipped the new title, and with new pipeline means new unforeseen problems, not to mention further optimization on the previous stuffs.

http://www.slideshare.net/naughty_dog/uncharted-2-character-pipeline
Here's an in depth look and example of what I mean. The characters who returned for Uncharted 2 from the first title is more than just a copy-paste models with different textures.

 

[Lime]

That's true only to a certain extend though. After a title shipped and they planned a sequel, at times they will modify their pipeline just so to avoid the mistakes they had when they shipped the new title, and with new pipeline means new unforeseen problems, not to mention further optimization on the previous stuffs.

http://www.slideshare.net/naughty_dog/uncharted-2-character-pipeline
Here's an in depth look and example of what I mean. The characters who returned for Uncharted 2 from the first title is more than just a copy-paste models with different textures.

Thanks for that link. Looks pretty informative so far.

 

[acm2000]

next gen should be cheaper than last gen if anything, the tech/art/etc are all already there now, the HD jump has been made, and the jump up to next gen wont be hard, since all the ground work will have been done already.

edit: lets face it, we went from:

ps1 = omg 3d!
ps2 = omg poly count & effects, fuck textures!
ps3 = ah crap, we need decent textures now....

and those textures will have been made at much higher quality that the final game needed

 

[Fudgepuppy]

I don't really have any experiences with game development, but isn't the example of The Witcher 2 and Amnesia being made with such small budget is because of the salary standard in those developer area is quite low (CDP Red is located in Poland) compared to the other AAA Games? (For instances, Bioware is located in Canada which surely have higher salary standardisation)

Thomas Grip's story about the production of Amnesia

Pretty damn interesting, and nowhere near as cheap and easy some would think.

And also, the reason it's cheaper to develop games in eastern Europe, is that everything's cheaper, meaning that you can pay developers less.

People who go from Sweden to Eastern Europe to work, make less than they would on student loans in Sweden, but everything costs a fraction of what it would cost in Sweden so it's proportionally good money.

 

[BruiserBear]

next gen should be cheaper than last gen if anything, the tech/art/etc are all already there now, the HD jump has been made, and the jump up to next gen wont be hard, since all the ground work will have been done already.

Came here to post this.

 

[-SD-]

Can we get next-gen graphics without the insane budgets?

Of course we can. It's just a question of management skills.

 

[beril]

exactly this. Demon's souls was projected to sell-and be profitable at- 75,000 copies stateside.

not 750,000. 75,000. It ended up being a wild success selling triple that.

It's not the prettiest game on the planet, but it's good looking, it's challenging, it's creative, and it spawned a great sequel and some imitators. The assertion that everything must sell 3 million copies and have a 100 million marketing budget to be successful is simply false. There's a lot of room for smart studios and good games.

The key word here is "stateside". That was just Atlus expectations, not really any indications of what it needed to make profit. Atlus didn't fund the development, just localised it. 75k would certainly be way more than they'd need to sell to cover the localisation costs, but it's no indication of what SCE needed for the game to be profitable.

I'm sure the game was very profitable overall, and I can easily imagine the budget being relatively low, but the 75k figure is pretty useless.

 

[acm2000]

also, thats probably just what it needed to sell to cover regionalisation costs

 

[laxu]

They could go down at least slightly if companies started regarding their product as GAMES again rather than interactive movies. All that time and money spent on epic cinematic videos or ingame cutscenes could be better spent elsewhere. Nobody really likes quicktime events or enjoys watching the same video during game loading anyway.

 

[Servbot24]

I don't think tessellation will actually speed up development. Its uses fall more along the "cosmetic" side than actual "world building".

Also, you still need alot of polygons for something to look good under tessellation so there's still some modeling involved.

Thanks to sculpting programs like ZBrush many modelers are able to create a very high res model and then whittle down the polycount until they're able to run in game. Same thing with starting with high res textures and having to downsize them.

 

[Raide]

You could probably take a large percentage of current-gen games, boost them to 1080p with all the fancy AA and DOF and they would be good enough. The Gears trilogy in 1080p at 60fps with al the texture loading issues gone? It would sell by the truckload.

I think there will be way more HD remixes/upgrades this generation that the last. This could actually keep budgets down if all they have to do is tweak some graphical settings. Take Dark Souls PC for instance. I doubt very much money was spent on getting the PC version working and it took Durante a short amount of time to show a massive increase over the console versions.

 

[beril]

Most things were costly this gen because of the HD transition. Now that we finally transitioned into HD and rendering has gotten easier, faster, and cheaper I see no reason why budgets would go up. Unless of course you have big bucks to spend. I expect AAA games to be blockbusters, but the small companies will always manage to make due.

The HD transition really wasn't as big a deal as some people make it out to be. The previous gen had a much greater leap in resolution, and if most games actually render in 1080p next gen (which is unlikely) that would be just as big a leap in resolution as going from 480p to 720p. And if next gen doesn't focus on improving resolution and IQ, it means they're spending hardware power on more detailed content, which costs money. If an argument can be made about smaller increase in costs next gen, it's because of the changes in the graphics pipeline that took place this gen, with developer already making high poly Zbrush/mudbox models for everything, but I think it's still somewhat naive to believe costs won't go up at all.

 

[Guerrillas in the Mist]

People seem to assume that nicer textures/shaders result in a huge budget increase, when it's probably more down to the celebrity voice casts, box-ticking exercises like tacked-on multiplayer, and poorly thought out marketing campaigns. There's visually gorgeous games like Witcher 2 which were made with the fraction of the budget of a COD game.

 

[Bisnic]

Always thought that what made some games have ridiculous budgets was mostly due to voice actors than the graphics. Which is probably why it won't get dramatically worse next-gen.

 

[PetriP-TNT]

I seriously doubt that tightening up the graphics on level 4 would ramp up the costs in any significant way. The assets these days are made at such detail that the problem is more on the hardware not being able to handle them.

 

[Orayn]

People seem to assume that nicer textures/shaders result in a huge budget increase, when it's probably more down to the celebrity voice casts, box-ticking exercises like tacked-on multiplayer, and poorly thought out marketing campaigns. There's visually gorgeous games like Witcher 2 which were made with the fraction of the budget of a COD game.

Pretty much. If you have a good engine and good art direction, you can have great visuals. It's everything else on top of that which causes budgets to bloat to insane levels.

 

[Zombie James]

The HD transition really wasn't as big a deal as some people make it out to be.

I think it was. Last-gen most people were still using CRTs and hooking things up with composite cables. This generation people were not only buying higher resolution displays, they were also using high quality connections so developers didn't have the luxury of outdated technology masking artistic deficiencies. I even remember reading a Sony presentation from 2003 or 2004 along those lines, encouraging developers not to use up too many resources and memory on high-quality assets as most people would never see them.

The transition from HD to better HD/4K seems a lot smoother to me, especially since (iirc) most studios are making higher resolution assets to begin with.

 

[szaromir]

Pretty much. If you have a good engine and good art direction, you can have great visuals. It's everything else on top of that which causes budgets to bloat to insane levels.

The simple world of NeoGAF users.

 

[beril]

Always thought that what made some games have ridiculous budgets was mostly due to voice actors than the graphics. Which is probably why it won't get dramatically worse next-gen.

I think people overestimate the cost of voice acting. Hundreds of people work full time for years on a AAA game. A few recording sessions with moderately well known actors won't really make a massive dent in a budget like that.

 

[Shadow of the BEAST]

alot of publishers would be better of focusing on smaller budgeted games that differentiate themselves from the cods and battlefield.

 

[Zombie James]

I think people overestimate the cost of voice acting. Hundreds of people work full time for years on a AAA game. A few recording sessions with moderately well known actors won't really make a massive dent in a budget like that.

Project management and having the right talent matters as well. Witcher 2 and Metro 2033 are some of the best looking games right now and they were done by relatively small teams. Not every company is run like Square.

 

[Power Glove]

College degrees don't come cheap ya know. As the cost of an education in the United States keeps rising, so does the cost of a great looking 8+ hour title.

 

[szaromir]

Project management and having the right talent matters as well. Witcher 2 and Metro 2033 are some of the best looking games right now and they were done by relatively small teams. Not every company is run like Square.

The Witcher 2 was made a team of 100. No exactly small scale.

 

[Zombie James]

The Witcher 2 was made a team of 100. No exactly small scale.

I was under the impression is was less than that. Oh well.

 

[vio]

I seriously doubt that tightening up the graphics on level 4 would ramp up the costs in any significant way. The assets these days are made at such detail that the problem is more on the hardware not being able to handle them.

I think for a 3D modellers will have way more work to do. Those sculpts in Zbrush are really detailed even now and that will not change. But those maps baked in Zbrush need to be applied to "low poly" model, which next gen will be not as low poly as they are now now.

But i do agree with you. Textures are created usualy in higher resolutions even now. Next gen is going to bring better lighting, high quality motion blur and bokeh DOF comparable to what you see in movies. Add better IQ and you already incredible looking games.

Developers just need to be smart in the way they want to make their game look really good and not just spend more and more on creating more plastic looking assets. A stunning looking game can be driven by Art and not technology.

 

[les papillons sexuels]

considering that this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw

is coming out of a small studio in finland I dont think it's impossible.

 

[RoboPlato]

considering that this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw

is coming out of a small studio in finland I dont think it's impossible.

Wow. Absolutely stunning. That's far beyond what I pictured next gen games looking like.

 

[DocSeuss]

The two things that add the most to game budgets are the things that require the most time. For graphics, that's statically lighting scenes for pre-baking over and over. For development, that's finding a way to achieve specific design parameters under slowly shrinking resource overhead. Some of the games late this gen with the longest development cycles required much of that time to script and rig levels and AI to provide a specific series of experiences.

More power isn't just good for graphics. The giant leaps in memory and processor power in the next gen consoles make design less of a death march. The less time it takes to make things happen during development, the cheaper games are to make.

The greater fidelity the asset, the longer it takes to create.

That said, if I remember right, it actually takes more time to create a normal map of a more complex model than to simply create the complex model, because that's an additional step.

I am pretty sure bureaucratic bloat is a part of the problem as well.

I mean, come on:

You have a task for one person, but because somebody is unable to take personal responsibility, you have several people to do that task, because it feels safe. It’s not safe. In fact it’s disastrous. Most of the time, those people will be fighting each other, duplicating their work and protecting their asses. They will hardly produce anything special or try something risky. The fact, that very often, their assignment will change, just because John or Steve changed their minds, which is happening all the time and usually scratches all progress that was made, is also not very helpful.

A dev I know told me that this is true of her workplace. I have no reason to believe it isn't true of others as well. Smaller, more focused teams should really help accelerate things.

considering that this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw

is coming out of a small studio in finland I dont think it's impossible.

Isn't that just two guys?

 

[Lathentar]

considering that this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLd8kEQJIzw

is coming out of a small studio in finland I dont think it's impossible.

You really should only talk about released games in this thread. A teaser trailer video of a game is not a game.

 

[Alexios]

You really should only talk about released games in this thread. A teaser trailer video of a game is not a game.

How do you talk about released next gen games before the platforms are out..?

And whether you get a good game out of this or not, they still made the graphics which is the point of discussion...