Ubisoft CEO - Top Tier Next Gen Games Will Cost $60m

Ubisoft's CEO and chairman has stated the company believes the next generation of top tier video games will see projects costing an average of $60m.

"The next generation is going to be so powerful that playing a game is going to be the equivalent of playing a CGI movie today," -

Lol. Oh Ubi. Yes, I'm sure you'll double the wages of all your employees for doing double the hard work to add double the detail.

Or maybe costs will remain the same cos you'll pay them all the same and demand the same deadlines regardless, so artists and tools will adapt to the new reality rather than take double the staff or double the time to create the same things with more detail.

Ridiculous. But we really need a break down on developer budgets these days and  see how the pie is cut up. If most of the money is poured into aesthetics, then f it.

That makes you wonder how much a top tier game for the PS3/360 would cost.

Gaming risks pricing itself out of the market with this 'graphics' race.

Let this be a lesson to people complaining about the $60 cost of games. Of which the publisher only sees about $30 (it costs $30 to print the disc and pay all associated fees and costs) which means you have to sell a butt load of copies just to break even, so the old "i'm not paying $60 bucks so they can squeeze shitload of profit out of me" argument it's just as bullshit as it ever was.

Anyway, if we see another console generation anytime soon you can bet your ass retail prices will go up. Probably back up to $70. But that's what the market gets for being a bunch of graphics whores, have you any idea how many fucking hours of painstaking work it takes a highly paid artist just to creat Marcus Fenix's face? A fuckton, not to mention every other piece of artwork that goes into a game and how many coders it takes hundreds and hundreds of hours to get AI and physics to a level that people find acceptable these days.

Who told you they're so highly paid? I can't imagine anybody but big-name hot-shot game designers earning more than the average wage of any other normal job. These exorbitant costs sound like bad management to me, all my friends that are in the industry sure as hell aren't overpaid, and they don't get less or more money if they work on Wii games or 360 games, it's all the same monthly wage, and with similar stupid deadlines that depend on the scope of the game rather than the platform it's going to be on, and they get similar unpaid overtime and all sorts of other shitty conditions. It's a tough industry. All the legitimate increase in cost I can see is external expenses like the increased use of voice actors and what not, but it's not like they tend to hire big ones for the story heavy titles, they only do that when they can afford to, like Patrick Stewart doing just the Emperor, but even in that case we've had many cases of heavy use of voice actors in past generations too...

That survey is very limited in scope and participation. It's a very particular audience and you can't even prove they answered truthfully or even know how many more members of the participating websites were alongside the excluded (?!) lowest common denominators in terms of wages (sub $10000) but simply didn't bother with such a survey. Being the only data we have about the subject doesn't make it valid data.

This is a really risky argument because wages are relative depending on where you are living right now. You also have to consider vertical and horizontal wage differences within and without the industry itself. I've got a friend who works in design and animation and he gets peanuts 'cos he's basically just a peon right now.

Besides, its kind of the development studios fault for getting funding and schedules to go out of whack and ending up into all these catatrophic failures which the current economic climate has already (unfortunately) weeded out tonnes of once big development studios. If the studio wants to stretch out their work cycle to epic lengths and pour tonnes and tonnes of money into their engines, its their own decision. The market shall right itself as they always say in economics.

Didn't GTA4 cost $100m?