kgrogers1979

This. Its really all about price elasticity. If consumers did not buy $60 games, then the companies would not be charging $60 for any reason, inflation or licensing fees or whatever.

Same thing with DLC in fact. People always blame the companies for "nickel and diming" us, but you know what? Its really more the consumers fault for buying it. A company won't keep producing something that doesn't sell. Just say no to DLC and eventually it would disappear. Problem is people don't really know how to say no.

Michael Corvin

All DLC is not created equal.

fumanstan

Licensing fees are not created equal.

jdpatri

On a related note: Didn't we pay $70 for Strider back in the day?

fujishig

I think it was 80 because of that chip. Phantasy Star II was $70, and I want to say Phantasy Star IV was $90, which I didn't buy because it was so expensive even though I loved the series.

That pales in comparison to Steel Battalion with controller, but I'm sure people have spent even more than that on Guitar Hero/Rock Band. And now Skylanders.

pinata242

mhg83

Action 52 for the NES was $200!

Drexl

Strider was an 8 megabit cartridge, one of the first IIRC. However, even though Street Fighter II was the first 16 megabit cartridge, I think it was still $60.

The amount of copies they could produce seemed to have something to do with it. Strider was a relatively early Genesis game, before Sonic the Hedgehog caused the system's sales to pick up. SFII was a blockbuster. I remember some RPGs like Final Fantasy III being more expensive ($80 for mine), and I suspect more limited sales/print runs was a factor because games like Mortal Kombat II were released around the same time with the same amount of storage (24mb IIRC), but a lower price.

kgrogers1979

I passed basic algebra, so I know what an exponent is.

Development of a video game for the Atari 2600: A team of ten people could program a game in less than a year.

Development of a video game for Xbox 360: A team of hundreds of people need on average 3-4 years to program a game.

That is not a linear increase. Its an exponential increase.

Drexl

I'm pretty sure the Atari 2600 games were one person per game though. Even when they needed E.T. finished in 6 weeks, it was one person that did it (Howard Scott Warshaw).

pinata242

You gave 2 points. That's a line. Did you make it to geometry?

kgrogers1979

E.T. is often cited as the worst game ever made that was nothing more than a quickly done cash grab. So its not really the best example. But yeah, the games had really small development teams. I know that it only took three people to program Pac-Man.


So funny I forgot to laugh.

I don't know specifics, but NES and SNES games didn't have development teams a mile long like modern games. They still had small teams developing a game in a fairly short amount of time. Sometime during the Playstation era is when the exponential increase really began forming. Final Fantasy VII is probably when it happened, because that is the first game I can recall that had an enormous credit list and production values rivaling a Hollywood movie.

pinata242

Basically what you're saying is that development has had a steady and expected increase in development time and cost. Ignoring the fact that engines and tools are reused to offset "reinventing the wheel". It's well known that costs actually go down as the life of a console goes on as development houses get familiar with the hardware and what it can do and how to re-leverage code and assets.

While true that generation over generation there's an increase, it's hardly exponential. If that were the case, it would be cost prohibitive by now. Even if you want to claim each generation is 1.5x harder more expensive than the last that would be, roughly:

Atari, NES, SNES, N64, CGN, Wii, WiiU = 1.5^6 is roughly 11.5x more expensive/lengthy to develop a game. So your "less than a year" becomes close to a decade.

So, what's your generation over generation factor for this exponential growth?

kgrogers1979

You do know I wasn't being serious, right? I was never trying to actually figure out a mathematical function for this crap. I couldn't care less. Sure in reality it is probably something less than exponential, but it is also more than linear as well. Its somewhere in-between that can't be shown with a nice neat mathematical function.

Saying that it is an steady and expected increase is erroneous. The difference between SNES and PS1 was huge. PS1 is when we first saw the big budget Hollywood style games with Final Fantasy VII. Nobody could have seen that coming. Heck, Square barely even saw it themselves since FFVII actually started out as an N64 game before they decided to switch to PS1 because it was growing to be too big a project for an N64 cartridge to handle.

Even if you want to take your 1.5 to the sixth power example of being 10 times more expensive and/or lengthy, that probably isn't far off. Games today cost upwards of $10 million. I can't say for sure, but I doubt if Atari games cost even close to a $1 million to produce. And the taking a decade to develop, you are forgetting one thing: the size of the teams. Atari teams were made of a dozen people or less. Modern teams number in the hundreds. If modern games still had small teams of a dozen people, it very well could take a decade or more for them to finish.

About an exponential increase becoming cost prohibitive, that is true, and how many small indie developers do you see now? Not many. They have practically all gone out of business since they can no longer afford to stay. Almost every company that has survived is a big name company with big bucks. There are still some small indie developers that make XBLA games, but those skew the exponential curve and have small budgets. They are still good games, but they certainly aren't the same.

pinata242

Yeah, indie gaming has never been more dead.

Posted from my iOS device

Groucho

Agree that indie gaming is dead. Now, if you'll excuse I'm about to fire up Steam...

kgrogers1979

Good grief.

You question my math skills, and now I have to question your reading comprehension skills.

Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, did I ever say indie gaming was dead. All I ever said is that it is a shell of its former self. Outside of XBLA, Steam, and ipad games, small indie games no longer exist. They simply can't afford to compete with the big boys anymore.

fumanstan

The "indie" term has kind of changed, but in the context of kgroger's post it seemed to be more pointed to independently owned studios that weren't under the umbrella of a publisher, opposed to the indie games you see on portable devices, Steam, or XBox that are being made by a couple of people themselves.

pinata242

Big publishers always gobble up the good "indie" devs.

Just in the last year EA bought PopCap and MGS took Twisted Pixel. There's still plenty of success out there. Zen, Harmonix, Halfbrick, Supergiant, etc.

Liver&Onions

I'm still pissed that Metal Gear Solid bought Twisted Pixel

kgrogers1979

Really I was talking about the small developers that make low budget games (or relatively low budget compared to the big boys).

Some examples.

Looking Glass Studios making the Thief series.
Ion Storm making the original Deus Ex.
Black Isle/Interplay making Fallout 1 and 2.

All three are dead and gone.

fumanstan

Ion Storm was a pretty big deal at the time.

kgrogers1979

For the year or two they were in business anyway.

Really they were only a big deal because John Romero left ID Software to start his own company, Ion Storm, but they really didn't do much before they ultimately went out of business. Anachronox and Daikatana were both mediocre at best, and nobody other than the most diehard fanboys remember them. Deus Ex was their one and only truly great success. Deus Ex 2: Invisible War was a huge letdown. Thief 3: Deadly Shadows was better than IW, but still paled in comparison to Thief 1 and 2. Then they went out of business.

fumanstan

The end result doesn't mean they weren't a big deal, let alone a small developer making low budget games.

kgrogers1979

They were most made up of ex-ID employees, probably not more than 20-30 total employees. That's a pretty small developer by 2000 standards compared to the likes of Square, Capcom, etc.

And while they weren't low-low budget games, they were relatively low budget compared to other games at the time. Don't get me wrong, I love Deus Ex. Its one of my all time favorite games, but it honestly didn't have a a very big budget. The death "animations" were laughable if you could even call them "animations" since they just fell over in like 2 or 3 frames. The voice acting, other than JC Denton and a few other characters, was like watching a bad b-movie, especially the Hong Kong sections had horrendous acting. Every time Louis Pan opens his mouth I want to do this:

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