I'm sick of threads like this, where someone sees a placeholder price on an australian website or a scaremongering article like this and everyone's suddenly "OMG I can't beleev the 3DS is going to cost 900 dollars US and the games are going to be the same price as Neo Geo games, what are we going to do!?"
Since when have development costs been directly correlated to retail price? DS development costs and the costs of manufacturing the carts have fallen significantly since the first dev kits went out. Are new DS games released in 2010 significantly less than they were in 2005? Go and look at Xbox 360 games on the shelf of your local games store. Have a look at something like Call of Duty: Black Ops and imagine the huge development budget that went into that game. Now have a look around and find a game that you think had a smaller development budget, maybe something like Hasbro Family Game Night. I think it's probably no exaggeration to say that the budget for Black Ops was hundreds, maybe even thousands of times that of Hasbro Family Games Night. So it should be no surprise that Hasbro Family Games Night costs $10 and Black Ops costs $1000, right? No, wait, hang on. That's not how it fucking works, is it? And movie-budget games nowadays are around the same price as SNES games were, the same price PS1 games were, the same price PS2 games were. The fact the PS3 has better graphics, the games have bigger budgets and are larger, take more time, effort and equipment to make, none of this has had any radical influence on the price of games any more than Avatar's huge and expensive development process made it cost 5 times more than Date Movie to see at the cinema or buy on DVD.
You see that huge list of developers that was released at E3, all those games companies desperate to work on the system? If Nintendo told devs that their games were going to have to retail for over $100 dollars, that line up would fit on a postage stamp. Think about things for half a second before you all do your Chicken Little impersonations.
I mean, even reading the original post should have made a penny drop.
QUOTE said:
Statistics from Tokyo Game Show organiser CESA reveal that producing a game for the DS in 2009 cost between $53,000 (£33k) and $527,000 (£329k). PSP development stood at between $36,000 (£22k) and $710,000 (£444k), Wii releases up to $1.4m (£875k), and PS3 and Xbox 360 games as much as $3m (£1.8m).
So 360 games can costs up to 6 times more to develop than the most expensive DS game. How much are 360 games compared to DS games again? 6 times as much?
Xdqwerty
Psionic Roshambo
AncientBoi
