Steel Revo Why does it cost so much money to develop a video game?
I was just reading some game info on one of the gaming websites I go to daily and found out that Red steel cost 12.75 MILLION! bux to make.. thats kind of crazy, I mean where is all the money going to? I can understand the cost of development software, paying the people, that would be a lot perhaps sum up in the hundred thousands but how the hell would it get to millions? and it saying its guna cost 24-48 million bux for the development of 360 or ps3 games, this is getting crazy... Why do you guyz suppose its costing so much money to make a game?
http://revo-europe.com/news.php?nid=9457
Eye and ear candy, pure and simple. It is all about making the graphics and sound more like a movie and less like an actual video game.
Look, lots of programmers have PROVEN it only takes at most one or two people with a solid, coherent vision to actually *make* a good video game: from Will Robinett (Adventure, Atari 2600) to Ed Boon and John Tobias (Mortal Kombat, arcades and beyond) to Alexey Pajitnov (Tetris, everywhere) to Akira Nishitani (much of the old-school, early Street Fighter games from Capcom) to Shigeru Miyamoto (Super Mario Brothers--and just about everything evolved from that) to Stephen Cakebread (Geometry Wars).
All the rest, really, is about finding the specialists: the motion capture artists, the detail people who make sure the polygons and bump-maps work out right, the sound people, the voice actors....and while eye and ear candy in a video game is cool to a point, lately it has been the RUIN of video gaming.
Really. Since when does a game count as a "Role Playing Game" when the *gameplay* consist of pressing a button or three once every 20 minutes and then waiting yet again for another cutscene to get done (_Xenosaga_ or _Xenogears_ anyone?? ANYONE??)? Especially in a genre where it is still as linear as all hell and "you must love the princess, even if you wind up turning her into a duck".
And the controllers are hell. More fiddly doo-dads than most normal humans have thumbs and more *tiny* doodads than what you see on some cell phones adds up to crappy control for *anyone* lacking freakishly tiny thumbs and/or fingertips. Sony LOST ME FOR LIFE with their crappy Four Chiclets of Death "d-pad", and also with their policy of NOT letting game companies program arcade-style games out to the analog sticks.
And frankly, letting PC Game programmers write the code is a STUPID thing to do....does it really need to be a mandate from the Suits that "every last doodad" gets used? Really, I thought the games based on _The Matrix_ were okay, until I realized just how contrived and impenetrable the control setup is...I mean, dudes, whatever happened to ECONOMY of Control? Meaning, you don't force the kids to give themselves *thumb hernias* trying to spazz out moves on two analog sticks, one *Profoundly* Crappy Yet Officially Diagonal Free "D-Pad", and *eight* different buttons at once.....and you don't say *screw you* to the GROWN UPS who are a) buying the games, and b) as often as not PLAYING the games with thumbs and fingertips that are way too honking big for the cheap, nickel-and-dimed piece of plastic whose only merit is that it *fits in the box* with the system.
Not to mention. CAMERA ISSUES. We have had since the PS1 and the N64 to get over bad camera issues in 3-d games, and I swear, game companies still think they can get away with murder on this one and on *next-gen games made for TVs I can't even BUY yet*, still have defective camera work ruin both the game view and game play....HELLO??
But yeah. We are having a situation here where you have too much eye and ear candy (even DDR is guilty of this....Hello? Can you say full-motion-video or Laserdisc style gameplay? As in "run this pattern or die" stuff?) and nowhere NEAR enough thought going into GAMEPLAY.
