Nobody seems to know for sure how big or small game budgets are these days. An interview with EA Partners head David DeMartini says they're falling -- a farewell blog post from former Google games-thinker Mark DeLoura says they're not, despite a shift toward cost-effective cloud-based gaming.
Psych test: Is the money going down or coming up?
Here's what DeMartini said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz: "But I think budgets for games have actually peaked and are starting to move in the reverse direction again."
Now, here's what DeLoura said in his farewell blog post today about the future of video games: "Games aren't getting cheaper to make, that's for sure, and it's important that technically complex features are still easily available to independent developers working alone."
So how much does it really cost to make a game? Remember that half a year ago, M2 Research analyst Wanda Meloni estimated the development budget for consoles games in 2009 was at $10 million for single-console and $18 to $28 million for multiplatform games. Social media/casual games hit between $30 and $300 thousand on a six month development cycle and mobile/iPhone games land between $5 and $20 thousand with a four month development cycle.
Nowhere in those estimates, however, do we see a breakdown of the costs. We know that with cloud-based gaming, development cycles don't necessarily get shorter. At the 2010 Game Developers Conference, Zynga explained how it was able to launch cloud-based game FarmVille in only five weeks -- but even after launch, the development team remains on the clock to roll out new content, tweaks, and bug fixes. We also know that console developers are increasingly going multi-platform.
Seems like only time will tell if 2010 is the year of the shrinking game budget. Hopefully, a shift in one direction won't come down to cutting big-budget blockbusters like Call of Duty: Black Ops or well-developed indie titles like Limbo.
Sources:
EA: Game budgets have peaked [GamesIndustry.biz]
Moving on from Google [Satori -- Mark DeLoura's blog]
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Source: Daily News from GamePro.com
Wednesday, August 25, 2010