Regardless of what any of us want, the whole idea of making video games is to make money. As it stands, it would seem that Sony isn't making it easy for anyone. This could be bad news for the PS3's future.
According to Namco Bandai President Takeo Takasu, due to production costs, each PS3 game will have to sell at least a half-million units to be able to make a profit. For comparison, the Wii costs half as much (which means half the sales for profit). The news is in stark contrast to the PS2, where some games that sell 100,000 titles are able to make money.
The sales levels required just to make money on the PS3 should be troubling for gamers. Sony's current Greatest Hits requirements are 400,000 copies, so it is very possible that a GH title could have lost the publisher money (and we could start seeing more of them as publishers scramble to break even). Will the high development cost prove to be prohibitive to the developers of niche games that made the PS2 a true global hit?
(Page 1) Reader Comments
They boned.
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1. The said figures true for all games costing a certain level. RedSteel cost 12+ million to develop, do you think its going to profit from 250k sales just because its on Wii? The unit sales/$ develop ratio is bascially the same across all platforms.
2. Develop costs go down over time, as developers become familiar with the environment and they accumulate game assets. The only reason Wii is cheap to develop for is because (1) devs are familiar with it from GC and (2) they are recycling GC assets. Basically, all the wii launch games were previously cancelled GC games and repackaged for Wii (Zelda is the most blatant example of this).
3. crono is a bonehead.. nice insightful comment, dude, and you go around calling people fanboys...
4. Naysayers were saying the same thing when PS2 launched.
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Sony has just showed time and again this generation that they expect everyone to cater to them. They have ignored everyone's needs but their own, expecting everyone to bend over backwards to accomodate them. It is an unhealthy direction for them to be taking the industry, and if they are successful...well I won't be happy about it. They seem to have forgotton most of what made PS2 great.
So, yea, while I don't want them to bomb, I don't really want to see the PS3 be a success. It seems like it would take the industry in an unhealthy direction. As amazing as the PS3 is, it isn't well thought out. It has every gadget crammed into it, but if they can't make a friendly development environment, and give it a good price (for what is essentially a toy), then I think they have forgotten why their product exists in the first place.
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e.g. if Namco make $10 from a Wii game and $15 from a PS3, then even if costs are double they only have to sell 1.33x as many to make their money back. I have no idea what slice of the pie they make but the higher price point for PS3 (& 360) games implies they make more than they do for Wii titles.
Besides, it should be pretty obvious that Namco et al don't just develop games in isolation. Game costs are spread over multiple consoles. Even if it costs twice as much to make graphics of the PS3 as a Wii, those same graphics (and fx, code) can and are reused on the Xbox 360 or PC. So the economics don't add up.
Even a game like RR7 carries over much of the code and graphics developed for RR6. It's hard to see how it necessarily costs Namco more to produce an enhanced PS3 Ridge Racer over having to write a Wii game from scratch.
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RvB anyone.
Hey man, if you can spout nothing but bullshit 3/5 of the time, I think I have the right to say something stupid every once in a while. You're still the blindest sony fanboy in disguise on here. At least I make no illusion where my loyalties lie.
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There's a basic unit production cost. Bringing in $30 million doesn't mean that you make a profit no matter how you bring in that $30 million. At $20, you likely lose money on each copy sold at the beginning, meaning you have to sell even more copies, not less.
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PS3 games are always going to cost RELATIVELY more to develop than Wii (lower-end tech) or XBox 360 (XNA) games.
Add to the mix that Sony has PS3 supply issues, a high price that locks out a good section of the market, and a low attach rate on the console, and publishers see that it becomes a lot harder to make their money back on PS3 development than for the other next-gen consoles.
This is why you are seeing a lot of publishers back off of their PS3 development plans, or stick with straight ports to the console, until something changes.
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Just because a PS3 game has twice the cost of development, does not mean it has to sell twice the number of copies before it is profitable.
read carefully and you might just learn something.
If a game development cost is 1 million for PS3, and 500k for wii, that's a cost upfront, before a single copy is printed or sold.
Then you add in the marketing for that game, which is the same for all systems. say that's 100k. Ok, so now the Wii game isn't twice as cheap to make...So even if each copy of the game makes $20 for the creators, the PS3 game doesn't have to sell twice as many game before it is profitable.
Also subtract out the cost to print the games to disc, ie Sony is probably more expensive if it is a small game (1dvd) put on a bluray disc, but they may be cheaper if it spans multiple discs (2-4 dvds). Maybe the license fee to use Bluray is really high.. I doubt it as Sony won't mind taking a loss early in the formats infancy in order to get more people on board (they can always jack up the license fee later and make a killing when all we have is Bluray).
That might seem fairly minor, and it is. A bigger chunk of the profit pie is the license fee for 3rd party developers to create a game on each system. I know certain companies *cough nintendo cough* in the past charged a lot more for a license, but I really have no idea what it's like now. Maybe Sony charges the most, maybe it's Microsoft, maybe it's NEC with their turbographix... I really don't know.
There is a lot more the the profitablity story then I've shown here, but without insider information, it would be pretty useless to start throwing numbers that I just made up.
All I know is I want one of the formats (Bluray/HD-DVD) to win soon, so I can get my one disc lord of the rings. I hate having to change discs mid film, it takes me out of the moment.
I want all the consoles to do well, as competition ultimately serves the gamer. If MS didn't come out with the X-box, the graphics on the PS3 wouldn't be nearly what they are. If sony hadn't released the Playstation, we would all be playing on our updated SNES with *new* coloured controllers!
Long post, but sometime I just like to rant!
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It may be true for now that there are less PS3s than the 360 but the feature set of both consoles is so close that porting isn't going to double your budget. I expect if you looked at EA's costs for porting Madden (for example) that it probably slapped a whopping 25% extra onto their budget to support both consoles instead of one. Why? Because virtually all of the codebase, graphics and sound are identical for both platforms.
Contrast with the Wii. The Wii is the odd man out. It has less memory, less CPU, less graphics, a weird controller. For now it's getting content ported up from the PS2 / GC / XBox code (e.g. Splinter Cell : DA, Call of Duty 3 etc.). Once the last gen dries up, it will be the one that costs companies more. They'll either have to produce exclusives from the same franchise (like Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam) or painfully attempt to cram a quart into a pintpot or simply not bother.
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The "unit sales/$ develop RATIO" isnt the subject of the posting.
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But the PS2 had an entire year to itself. An entire year with NO competition. The DC was dead. The PS was dead. The N64 was dead. No competition. So it didn't matter how hard it was to program for. It did not matter how costly it was. They were the only console in town.
The PS3 does not have this luxury. Not only are they in competition, but they cost more and come in fewer numbers.
Meanwhile, the 360 does not have that year advantage, either. The Xbox was dead, true, and the GC was mostly dead, but the PS2 was still alive and kicking, holding the 360 back considerably.
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I'm surprised that, with your high opinion (sarcasm) of joystiq, you read joystiq at all anymore. I sure as hell don't know why the hell I read it either. Maybe I'm just too lazy to make the rounds at gaming news sites? From sensationalist headlines like "New Zelda Falls Flat", where the biggest gripe is that you have to push a button to read a sign (that justifies falling flat?), to jumping on inaccurate stories (the padded memory of "Resistence") out of fear of being out of date (yet they put a post on a real-life replica of the Master Sword that's two years old?), this site has just become a huge mess.
Good lord, is it a mess.
Back on topic... Sony, reduce the price of the PS3 then I'll consider buying. Thanks.
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That doesn't make much sense - by that rationale, Nintendo DS games should be out-the-ass expensive to make.
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The PS3 is considerably more difficult to program for than the 360. It's hardware is considerably more complicated (ie. 8 processors to program as opposed to 3). These complications add more man hours to each game to be programmed, much less debugging. Then, throw on the fact that 3rd party devs won't even be able to start on games for a year... Sony is shooting their toes off one by one.
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Oh, and people, don't mind crono. He's just a troll trying to cover himself by calling everyone a fanboy. His comments are evidently useless, and he brings nothing useful to the conversation. I've seen his fanboyish rants for a while now and it's ridiculous. He ought to be banned.
Crono,
Every time you point a finger at someone, four fingers are pointing towards you. I don't know if you will get that, so let me translate this for you: What do you think calling everyone else a fanboy makes you? Tsk, tsk.
And by the way, if you are truly a gamer and not a fanboy, you should re-consider anything related to Sony/PS3. Every machine has its killer games, some people think that Resistance is already one of those. When the great games come for it, will you keep hating and missing on them? By empirical evidence, I'd say yes and would have no hope for you.
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For most people additional processors seem to speed things up because the operating system handles the multithreading. But to do it in a single program (like a game) adds a whole new level to development. The whole cell processor with tons of cores thing is cool, and allows for unprecedented levels of multiprocessing in a home system, but also takes a whole new level of programming skill and theory. In a way this is a good thing, because with multiple cores becoming the norm it is time for games to start taking advantage of it. On the flip side, no, development costs on the PS3 will never be the same as on the other systems, because they have a whole new dimension of hardware to deal with.
The question is if they are ahead of their time or not. Is the industry ready for that level of multiprogramming and the costs associated with it? Is game development theory advanced enough in that department to take advantage of it? Is the market big enough to handle the additional cost of development? Only time will tell.
It is definitely a bleeding edge system, but the reason it is called the bleeding edge (a bit ahead of cutting edge) is because, well, it is a really risky place to be. The technology tends to "cut" you.
We'll see where this goes I guess.
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-Daigoji-
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The power of multiple cores comes in multi programming, that is, the processor being able to do more things at once. Most programs are single threaded, the processor handles the mutliprogramming. Some applications, like browsers and databases already take advantage of multiprogramming. Games, as a rule, do not.
It will NOT cost the same amount to develop for the 360 as the ps3, blue ray aside, because, in order to really take advantage of all that power, the games have to be multithreaded. And it is about time. With duel cores becoming the norm, games need to start taking advantage of multiprocessing.
But the cell has a bit more than 2 cores. A lot more actually.
This adds a whole new dimension to game development, and we don't have a foundation fo it yet. The theory, the design patters, haven't been developed yet. On the one hand, this could really push forward game theory, on the other hand, if it is to ahead of its time, and we don't have the framwork (libraries and theories etc), it is going to cost developers a LOT more.
So no, it is not just a matter of time till the development costs come down. It is not the same as developing for the 360. It is a whole new (and fairly exciting to computer scientists) beast. But don't try to ignore the problems it introduces and pretend it is "just the same" as the PS2. The PS2 was a relativly simple machine. The PS3 is an engineering marvel, but we will have to wait an see if it is ahead of its time. It also adds new development costs to ports, at least if the company doesn't plan ahead and lay a groundwork for multithreading (though the 360's processor can take advantage of multithreading too, but with the more limited processor it would take more cputime, while still cutting down on real time, just not as much. And its overthreading threashold will be significantly lower).
Anywho...yea.
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Let's assume that there's a fixed production cost of $10 per copy, and that anything charged above that goes towards recouping development costs (and hopefully, eventually, profit).
It would take 2.5 million sales at the $20 price point to match the profitability of 500,000 sales at the $60 price point. How many games have sold 2.5m copies? Not many.
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You're wrong on the highest levels, and it is very clear that you have never written a line of code in your life.
I, on the other hand, am a professional software engineer. And I can tell you that programming for the PS3 and the XBox 360 are *NOT EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE* to "virtually all of the codebase" are identical. That's lunacy, and you're spreading completely untrue information.
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"Even if you hit the metal on the PS3 I doubt there are any great shakes there even with the Cell processor."
You're free to doubt all you want, but you are incorrect.
"the feature set of both consoles is so close that porting isn't going to double your budget."
I agree, and that's the point I was trying to make. Developing an exclusive title ground up for PS3 is prohibitively expensive in most cases. What you are going to see is people developing for the 360, and runnning port kits to crank out a low-cost version for the PS3.
Unfortunately, it is very hard to sell a console when it is more expensive than your competition, and most of your titles are ports from your competitor's platform.
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You said everything I wanted to say, but didn't feel like explaining. Mostly cause I didn't think most people would care. But yeah, the PS3 is extremely difficult to program for right now.
I really want one though, mostly to run a Linux fileserver. My current one is getting obsolete.
Of course I will wait until it is cheaper, better games are released AND for the days of camping are not necessary to find one.
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Now go ahead and change that to about "$1 fixed production cost per copy".
There we go. I have no idea where you pulled $10/copy from, but the materials to produce a game a ridiculously cheap, especially in mass quantity (read: pennies per disc). How do I know? Well, I am a software engineer at a media duplication company.
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Even when games do start to do SPU programming there is no compulsion to use all SPUs at once or even some of them. And when they are used the code can be wrapped up behind a nice abstraction. An SPU is just a glorified number cruncher that you can call synchronously or asynchronously. It's not easy to programme but neither is it especially hard. If someone can wrap their heads around assembly language or a shader language, or DirectX or altivec, they can manage cell programming. And the chances are that the SPU will increasingly happen behind the scenes in the physics and graphics engines so the everyday programmer doesn't even have to care that it is happening.
Stop making out that its some impossibly hard thing to learn because it isn't.
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You were one of the first people here to start calling the Wii Gamecube 2 (or 1.5 or whatever) but that is actually a plus for dev teams - they don't have to waste time and money on resources that would otherwise be spent learning how to program for the system.
I think that licensing fees for BR discs, the need to learn the new system, and the aforementioned higher production values for high-def hurt devs in the long run, because they have to spend more to make games of the same length as before.
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It would take 2.5 million sales at the $20 price point to match the profitability of 500,000 sales at the $60 price point. How many games have sold 2.5m copies? Not many."
They havn't sold that many because games have traditionaly been priced at $40-$60. I havn't bought a game for years. Only rent. If games were $20 I'd be a lot more likely to purchase it. Game makers make nothing from rentals. And the production cost per game is more than likely $1.00 or less. Do the math with that one.
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If that is true, then you would understand that while the API's remain the same, somebody is still doing all the specialized programming beneath it. Unless you're using 3rd party engines, which in the gaming industry to day is still pretty rare (though I think that will change more as time goes on), you still have to do all the specialized CPU and GPU programming. And the engines are the huge bulk of the work.
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A cell processor has 1 main traditional core and 7 spe's (1 disabled for yield).
An xbox 360 has three traditional cores. Each core can run 2 threads.
so on a thread level ...a cell can do 7 while an Xbox 360 can do 6. There is almost no difference.
And, as we all know by now ...it is the gpu that bottlenecks the system at high resolutions. In this regard, the xbox 360 clearly has a better GPU than the PS3.
What does this mean? Both are similiar as far as potential performance goes. There is nothing on the PS3 that will allow this imagined future performance increase sony types keep harping about.
When the xbox 360 was released ...all the sony boys said hold off as the PS3 is just around the corner. Sony said so. The result? The platform was delayed and then delayed again.
So now we have the same Sony people saying..forget current performance..the PS3 will pwn in the future. This is simply not correct ...just like the PS3 production schedule was incorrect.
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Anyway I can't believe some of you guys are eating up what someone in namco is saying .......It's NAMCO people.This is the same company that made soul calibur 3 on the playstation 2 even soul calibur 2 sold more on the game cube.
There sales have suck for the past 3 years no wonder they are bitching about having to sell more games to make a profit.
Wake me up when a real japanese company like sqaure-enix,capcom ,koei or konami start talking about profits...............
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I'm really not quite sure what you're talking about. I've never said I haven't been a fanboy, and the only person I regularly call out as fanboy is >, and any of the other guys who say things like "PS3 IS TWICE AS POWERFUL AS THE 360".
I've had a few rants of the fanboyish variety, but just because I'm hating on sony, doesn't mean I'm doing it blindly. I have plenty of good reasons, and if you had any form of reading comprehension, you'd know what they are.
I should congradulate you, you are the first person on here to call for my banning. Silencing an opposing view is far worse than being a fanboy, even a blind fanboy.
Sure, I troll every now and then, but who doesn't? I was in a goofy mood. You want to ban me now?
Anyone, on topic: High production costs for software is going to hurt the PS3. Everyone has already said this. It was made pretty obvious in the article. It doesn't translate to requiring twice the number of software sales, as this is also dependant on other costs and profit margins.
If you look at all the news, from all angle, no matter what you "fanboy" allegiance is, Sony is in very big trouble.
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"I have to disagree with you, #2. I don't think that games on both the PS3 and Wii share the same numbers as far as profitability go. For starters, you're going to have to hire a lot more people to develop a typical PS3 game... for HD content, to learn the new hardware architecture, etc.
You were one of the first people here to start calling the Wii Gamecube 2 (or 1.5 or whatever) but that is actually a plus for dev teams - they don't have to waste time and money on resources that would otherwise be spent learning how to program for the system."
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Also, isn't this where middle-ware providers like Epic would be a saving grace for the PS3 and potentially the 360? Rather than coding the game itself, developers could purchase an engine and use their own assets, storyline, etc. I thought that some of these middle-ware companies were being used A LOT (like the Unreal Engine).
MY understanding, which could be completely wrong, is that the 360 and PS3 are more costly to develop for because the games are being created for HD. While the Nintendo Wii is certainly easier to program for since it's using the same basic architecture of the GC (but a new CPU and GPU), it's the fact that developers only need to build assets to a 480P standard, not 1080.
Do I have my facts wrong, or is the coding for the Cell and PowerPC really adding that much cost to the PS3's and 360's development expenses?
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If Sony doesn't get the number of units up to a reasonable level very soon - the losses will continue to compound quarter by quarter until they do...
...when the dust settles, those of us that have the system to keep better hope that the PS3 survives and we get to play the games we bought the system for (cue the spotlight on all of the Sony franchise titles).
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It is not compulsory, but if you want better graphics than you had better take advantage of it (and if you are charging me 200$ more you had darn well BETTER deliver better graphics, and exclusives instead of ports).
Remember me talking about framework and background having to be set up? And how we will see if it is ahead of its time and support? Could that be the background abstract stuff you are talking about? That thing I already mentioned and discussd?
I never said it was hard to implement multiprogramming, I said it added a new dimension to design. And it does. Heck implementing it is easy. Fork() or pthread, or whatever your particular language calls for. But you don't just throw in an extra thread and expect it to help.
"If someone can wrap their heads around assembly language or a shader language, or DirectX or altivec, they can manage cell programming." Its not that simple. That is like saying if someone can warp their heads around assembly or c they can handle java (with no tutorials and no OO groundwork). Its just not that easy. When the theory is in place it is easy, and when game theory catches up with the cell it will be easier, bud just like developing new 3d games tends to be more expensive than the old 2d games were, programming for the cell will be more expensive (until it is good and grounded in about 10 years) than for traditional single core processors.
Like I said, we'll see how fast theory catches up with the reality of the cell.
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Well, it's pretty simple. The crappier the dev tools, the harder it is to develop. The harder it is to develop, the more expensive it is.
It's not just programming stuff in c++ and then running it through two compilers, you know? While a lot of the assets are similar, the backbone of the game, which is the program code and memory management,is different.
In the case of the 360 vs. Ps3, the difference is staggering between the two systems, and the 360 architecture takes a lot of the work out of the developer.
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While a developer can take a gamecube game and release it relatively unchanged for the Wii, the same cannot be said for taking a ps2 game and releasing it on the ps3.
That tells me there's something wrong with the industry. Bully just came out 3 months ago, but if it came out today on the PS3, would it have gotten the high scores it got? 3 months ago the game was a 9/10 in many publications, but today, that same game would get a 6/10 with remarks about how horrible the graphics are. Does that make sense?
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Obviously you may wish to use the power of the SPU, but that's a whole different argument. I'm challenging the assertion that developing for the 360 is somehow cheaper than the PS3. I see no reason that is the case at all. On the 360 you might have to spawn a bunch of threads and worry how they synchronize and share memory. In the PS3 you have to queue or coordinate jobs for the SPUs and gather the results up. I expect that if the PS3 were first and the 360 second that there would be people having this exact conversation in reverse claiming the 360 was harder and more expensive because companies had to pull out the SPU bits and turn them into threads. They wouldn't be correct either.
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Nah, now we'd get a game like Katamari on the XBox Live Arcade or Playstation store. See: Castle Crashers. Instead of paying $20 for that on a disc we'll all probably pay $10 or $15 to download it.
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For low end productions a major portion of the cost difference will be determine by the tools available to mitigate the PS3's greater complexity. For SNK to port a 14 year old Neo-Geo game to the PS3 with a few enhancements should not be greatly more expensive than a similar project for the Wii. Much of the difference would come from the details, such as making the game look very good at 1080p rather than just scaling the 480p image.
These costs are a factor long after the learning curve of the first project on a new platform has been overcome.
Justin, you seem to think Sony is forcing publishers to make their games into Greatest Hits items regardless of where the game's P&L balance is at. I'd be very surprised if Sony granted themselves this power in their publishing contracts because I doubt any of the big companies like EA would stand for it.
400K is entry level for Greatest Hits but most GH titles have far higher numbers. The titles that go GH while just barely clearing the minimum sales requirement are niche titles whose existence is viewed as valuable to the platforms image by Sony and retailers. That the game would have a narrow audience was usually understood by the developer going in and the budget scaled appropriately.
#16
Good point. There is a reason why, for all its severe limitations, the GBA is a money machine. Unless a developer is dedicated to making the best showpiece game ever for the platform, there is only so much a well run operation can manage to sink into a GBA project. An outfit with unrealistic ambitions could blow an unlimited sum but that applies to any platform.
#23
Indeed. One thing people keep neglecting is that the Cell doesn't just mean a whole bunch more threads. It is a radical departure even for coders accustomed to producing multithreaded apps for SMP systems. It is the pain of the PS2 magnified by several times. The 360 is pretty conventional and straightforward by comparison.
The have been systems like the Cell previously, especially in supercomputers but rarely were they applied to real-time interactivity, which introduces so many additional hurdles. What a lot of people don't appreciate is that for all of its power, a Cray doesn't necessarily lend itself to gaming.
#28
Have you looked at the throughput specs for the PPC core in the Cell? If your project ignores the SPUs it had better have extremely low performance needs. Any company looking to produce PS3 games with coders who cannot grasp how to use the SPUs had best quit immediately before they've wasted any money. Apart from managing the SPUs that PPC core is pretty gutless by today's standards.
This would be on a par with ignoring the vector units in the PS2's EE. You could port PS1 code and make it look better but not by a lot. Much past the launch period your games would be suitable only for the bargain bins.
#37
Actually, that hasn't been true for a long time. Thanks to the vastly greater installed base, the sales of PS2 Soul Calibur II long ago passed the GameCube version by a several hundreds of thousands.
Also, consider the cost proposition from NamCo's perspective. Putting a version on all three machines, including a custom character for each, was far more costly than just producing one version. Since the PS2 installed base substantially outnumbers the other two machines put together, it has the potential to easily move as much product as producing three SKUs. A big factor in this is that a growing portion of the gaming market owns ultiple machines. A person who is definitely going to buy a new Soul Calibur entry is just as likely to get the default PS2 game as a version for another machine because it has a cooler custom character. Eliminate those other choices along with their costs and the PS2 version easily makes as much profit for the company for much less effort.
PErhaps you haven't noticed, but all of those other companies you've mentioned all gravitate to the platforms with the best number for market reach. Square Enix most of all, with multiplatform titles a rarity for them. It is no coincidence that several titles that had been announced originally as solely for the PS3 are now being touted as also for the Xbox 360. If there was confidence in Sony building the PS3 installed base quickly this would be far less likely, especially considering how focused From is on their native market.
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