High-end technology to increase cost of development, says Epic Games
Epic Games is of the opinion that the cost of developing games for the next-generation consoles will be double to what is spent on creating games for current-generation consoles.
Speaking during a presentation at the Montreal International Game Summit, the technology adviser at Epic Games Tim Sweeney revealed that the three-minute tech demo of Samaritan Unreal Engine 3 had been produced in four months despite the development team
working on it comprising of 30 members.
According to him, the project had used far more resources than what a project of similar length built on traditional technology would have used.
Before the audience became too alarmed, Sweeney conceded that his studio had fine tuned the production tools, which had allowed them to bring the production cost significantly down.
Therefore, instead of the next-generation projects utilising five times more resources than is used by projects for current-generation consoles, the future hardware would cost to twice as much, which is far more acceptable.
"If we extrapolate that [Samaritan development] into creating an entire game, we were worried that the cost would go up by a factor of three or four or even five in the next generation," he said. "And of course, we felt that was not acceptable."
With the cost of development for next-generation games being greater than the development expenditures of games that are available in the market today, consumers may find themselves staring at really expensive games in the future.
Even though the Gears of War maker believes the cost to rise upon shifting to the high-end hardware, Ubisoft and Take-Two seem to have a different opinion.
According to the CEO of Take-Two, developing games for the next-generation consoles would prove to be much more convenient and less costly, whereas the CEO of Ubisoft does not expect the high-end technology to have a significant impact on the development
cost of the games.
While the topic of high-end technology is hot in the gaming industry, it is still unclear when Sony and Microsoft plan on bringing their next-generation consoles to the market. Most of the analysts are predicting that the two companies would launch their
high-end consoles during the holiday season next year.
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