Epic expects next-gen dev costs to double
Tim Sweeney says escalating costs could have been worse, free-to-play “more and more inevitable”
Games for the next-generation consoles and PCs will come with suitably next-generation price tags. In a keynote address at the Montreal International Game Summit today, attended by GamesIndustry International, Epic Games chief technology officer Tim Sweeney said he expects Epic to be able to build next-gen titles for “only about double the cost” of games from the start of the current generation.
While the bump in budget is significant, Sweeney said it could have been worse. He talked about Epic's first next-gen tech demo, a 2011 clip called Samaritan that showed off Direct X 11 technology in a modified version of Unreal Engine 3. While Sweeney said Epic was enthusiastic about the results, the company was “greatly worried” about the cost. Although the clip was just under three minutes in length, it took four months and a team of 30 people to create.
“If we extrapolate that 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,” Sweeney said. “And of course, we felt that was not acceptable.”
The demo convinced the company to double down on its content and production tools. The company was able to partially offset the increase in next-gen costs with improved production efficiency, which Sweeney said brought the projected cost of development down.
Another trend Sweeney underscored in his talk was the idea of the game industry “defragmenting.” Games are crossing borders more easily than ever before (he noted the global popularity of League of Legends), and he added that crossing platforms is going to become more common as the console, PC, mobile, and browser-based markets converge on a common feature set marked by high-resolution displays, Direct X 11 graphics, and multicore CPUs.
Sweeney addressed more disruptive trends in the industry, such as the arrival of free-to-play gaming.
“Free to play gaming is becoming more and more inevitable,” Sweeney said. “If a user has world-class, AAA free-to-play games to choose from side-by-side with $60 games that are available only on a disc in a retail store, free-to-play games are very likely to win. So we need to really be mindful of this trend and start building games that have monetization and are designed to be piracy-proof.”
Epic is preparing its own foray into the world of free-to-play games with the upcoming PC game Fortnite.
Sometimes I have the feeling big players in this industry are actually happy about budgets going up. It's like they forget that means more sold copies are needed to break even (I remember an article about how non-sensical it was for EA to come and say they needed to sell like 5M copies of Dead Space 3 just to break even...)
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/06/08/cliff-bleszinski-explains-the-next-generation-of-games.aspx?PageIndex=3
I too am confused by this apparent disagreement by (ex) employees of the same company. I'm sure there's a rational explanation. It's just I can't think of one.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Dan Howdle on 13th November 2012 5:46pm
Considering the names involved, and the intention of selling said tool set, that such a discrepancy wouldn't exist (at least not publicly stated).
And twice the costs might be enough to put all but the biggest of developers/publishers out of business year 1. Actually, I'd be quite surprised if many seek/grant bigger budgets. Last generation saw the retail price gain $10 to help offset that increase in costs. We won't see another $10 increase this time. Especially with price options that are making the $60 sticker price of this generation seem much too high for certain gamers.
You could say that you'll need less optimization because there's more horsepower available, this might be true until the first dev releases a killer title that really makes smart use of the memory and performance available. After that, the pressure is on.
They are actually saying the same thing: Tim Sweeney is talking about "double the cost from the start of current generation", whereas Cliff was talking about next-gen compared to current cost of games (ie at the end of current-generation)
As game budgets have nearly doubled since the beginning of this generation, this makes sense.
Yves Guillemot also said recently that he expects dev costs to remain flat at least for the first two years of next-gen as they are going to develop 'cross gens'.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Pierre Bernardin on 13th November 2012 8:50pm
The current state of the art is jaw dropping visually. I just don't want to watch it anymore, the novelty wore off years ago. Amount of in-game cut scenes required to make a game play better? Nil.
1) They are only moving the same number of dots around as this generation.
2) They can use libraries and tools built during the current generation.
3) Where is the money going to come from to pay twice as much for games to be made?
4) With the likes of Unity we are experiencing a breakthrough in the ease of game development.
That said, its easy to see situations where game development costs will double, given the fact that many teams will be expecting to design models and worlds of a far greater complexity.
Just look at the evolution of Gran Turismo as a case study. Cars that took a few days to create turned into a few weeks, then a few months. Its easy to see how costs and development demands can increase. However, another factor to be considered is the rise in development outsourcing. Distributing development across continents and hiring skills from emerging markets is another approach to reducing costs.
Its the approach/angle that matters and can't just be a straight yes or no answer.
The Tec Guy ~AC
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Adam Campbell on 14th November 2012 1:59pm
Surely games like Skyrim and Assassin's Creed 3 could be ported straight on to the next consoles, given the breadth of difference between their console and PC versions.
Because we're not running on the idea next gen games will effectively be 360/PS3 titles with better resolutions and textures . We're looking at the implications of making ground up next generation productions, which is presumably where the suspected rise in cost will come from (significantly higher detail in objects/more of them means potentially more development time and subsequently money).
That is of course if a studio decides to invest time and money into doing so. If we look at the amount of time it takes to make the kinds of assets we're seeing in next gen tech demos such as Square-Enix' Agni's philosophy, it could mean a significant jump in costs. Now, that's unless (as one solution) some of the those duties are outsourced to a low cost workforce.
Some of the more artistically original titles I've played have 2D graphics or a cartoony look. Style can be defined in many different ways and I think one of the caveats of the current generation is that many (most?) of the major developers have gone the grey-brown route of trying to recreate environments that value realism over style.
When you go for a style that differs from what you see around the corner of the street, a lot of liberties can be taken to bring that world to life without having to border on that uncanny valley situation. Fun is not defined by realism, in most cases anyway. That's not to say developing or designing a cartoony environment does not come at a cost, but I believe it can be achieved successfully with less resources and still be considered AAA in terms of quality.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Hugo Trepanier on 14th November 2012 6:37pm
The problem is that people are already fed up with paying 60 dollars (42 pounds?!? here in England) for games on this gen. I'm afraid that they are simply not going to be prepared to pay more next gen.
As others have already pointed out, the next gen will simply see PC Ultra High settings finally brought to consoles. Remember that a high definition TV is only 1920 * 1080 so that's the pixels you have! There isn't going to be some sudden amazing ability to cram in a 2560 * 1600 super hi-def HDR image onto that living room screen. Graphics cards haven't suddenly skipped a generation either and aside from the geometry shaders making things far more detailed close up and so better at keeping the immersion going when your Master Chief is looking directly at a wall. Not a heck of a lot is going to change.
Even if the processing power won't rise as much, the increase in RAM alone will have massive implications on asset creation, level size and level of detail in the world.
Some of the suggestions here are like saying we won't see anything better than Doom 3 on Xbox 360 when clearly that title has been blown out the water in terms of the types of visual effects, lighting and dynamic systems we get in games. In fact its a flawed argument I see used at the beginning of just before the beginning of a new console generation.
There are things in titles out there that you don't even see in the FFVII tech demo, which seemed an awful lot more impressive back then than it is now.
Whilst I'm not expecting all titles to suddenly look like Agni's Philosophy, the headroom should be a lot closer to that. Than Witcher 2, which to be honest isn't going to be that impressive. You can still tell how much these games are expected to scale through previous generations looking at the way assets have been made etc. Hardly any titles are made with a real philosophy based around the types of features you get in an a DX11 architecture either let alone anything above that either.
After seeing the original Crysis running on PS3 and considering just how much of an increase the next set of console are expecting in terms of performance, I find it hard to set my expectations so low. Obviously, guys like this in the article are expecting a lot more too.
The Tec Guy ~AC
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Adam Campbell on 15th November 2012 6:04pm
I made that last bit up.