Krome CEO: Developer budgets have increased more than games market

.....and then there's Nintendo's systems. Like iPhone/iPod apps, it's really the only route to develop and turn a sizable profit.

This is why 3rd party support is so strong for the Nintendo systems, because despite their apparent "failures," most projects are guaranteed to profit, even quality games, you're still talking about a budget a quarter of the cost of a "quality" (non-budget) PS360 title.

Obviously the industry moved forward faster than was natural

Game budgets need to decrease, by a lot. This way developers will be forced to innovate and try to come up with compelling reasons (such as a good story) to play a game, rather than just throw money at a half-assed game with flashy graphics and no substance.

It's almost exactly like the movie industry in that way. As budgets increased, movie quality went way down.

Best graph ever.

"If you look over at these lines, they are intersecting. Which means statistically that something is going up and going down and right here they --- is that BATMAN?!" *runs away*

Well I think gaming is safe until it reaches a kajillion dollar difference.

We've already seen the effects of this play out. More and more developers will be shuttered.

There are tonnes of games that sell around 50k units and make profit. You would have to over spend and greatly undersell to lose money.

Uh... I see that "developer happiness" increased during the 2000-2005, which was the time the PS2 was around until the X360 came out... where it starts to fall...

Just what I see.

@rowd149
They are dating sims, and no they aren't graphically heavy. Which is what I'm saying, you don't need to make a high budget game to be profitable. An indie developer like Krome isn't going to be making graphic heavy, state of the art games.

There are more opportunity for indie developers now than ever before. Time to quit that salaried position and go make your own.

This was inevitable

1. PS3/360 Development kits cost a lot more than they did for the PS2/XBox.

2. Programing the kits and developing game takes longer which means more salary has to be paid to the programmers for the longer period of development.

3. Legitimate software coders (none of that DeVry game programming school shit) are getting more expensive because they want higher pay for a job that is harder to do nowadays (duh).

This was predicted Pre-Current gen console release and hence why the weak have been weeded out (Midway and etc.)

I'm wondering what kind of unit describes a market, an amount of money, and happiness.....

>.<

I wish Kojima would learn this. Same for Square Enix. The more money they spend, the less fun I have with their games filled with so much that doesn't need to be there.

The entire industry needs to learn "less is more", before it's too late.
Okay, back to Plants vs Zombies I go. A fun game without much development cost, but plenty of profit to those who made it.

Not surprised. The processors are getting more powerful, making you able to do more in a game. The graphics chips can handle more textures, polygons, and effects. That by itself makes having the best graphics more expensive. However, the 360 and the PS3 have a different development model compared to what was traditionally done for a successful gaming console. The 360 has 6 hardware threads of execution (in 3 physical cores), and the PS3 has 2 threads + 6 coprocessors available to the developers. It's very hard to use either model at 100% of all threads of execution.

I have used multicore optimized programs before, and quickly learned that some of those programs don't even go past 75% utilization on my multicore PC.

Just another example of why it's crazy when people moan about $60 games.

Given the massive inflation and development costs that have risen by thousands of percent, it's crazy that we're still only paying $10 more for games now than we were 20 years ago.

And relative to adjusted inflation, we're actually paying a LOT less.

This is all Sony's fault, they created the Cell Processor which drives up development costs far higher then they need to be. Blu-ray is another burden, 50 fucking bucks for a 50 gig disk when GE's micro-holographic technology can do it for $5!

To elaborate on the problem with the Cell, before any Sony fan-turds bitch, it uses 8 special purpose cores (each with a different instruction set) unlike all other multi-core designs which use a common core (with the same instruction set). Sony tried to force the industry to specialize in their not-superior technology so developers wouldn't support other platforms.

This is hurting all gamers, we're seeing higher development costs, longer development times but we're not really getting better games for it. The standard design used in PC CPUs for quite some time now is far superior because programmers can then work with any platform and not just one.

I play across three systems mainly (and on occasion PC) 360, Wii, and DS cause they offer me a wide selection of games but don't hurt the medium I love. I have a PS1 and my girlfriend has a PS2 but we're not getting a PS3 cause of the Cell and Blu-ray.

Hi.