i'd suggest you guys sit back and think about this for a while...
although yes the cost of a game suchas C&C Generals was around the $13million mark,
remember this was developed over 2years
a)pay for 100 employee's who worked on it ranging from $20k-$280k/year
b)an external music & sound house (which is another 25 people)
c)cost of PCs ... 100pcs running for 10hrs/day 6days/week 330days/year equals to huge electricity bill, not to mention the lighting, air conditioning costs, canteen, etc...
d)the cost of publicity, TV Adverts, E3 Advertising & Booth, Magazine Advertising
e)the cost of professional interfaces for physics and such
f)training costs to train people in the use of Pixel & Vertex Shaders
e)around 30 new copyies of 3D Studio Max5 which was released halfway through development, along with all of the upgrades needed suchas Character Studio4 & Reactor2
f)prototype hardware from nVidia & ATi, as well as a few new top end systems to put the game through its paces
g)mai, cd & packaging cost for all 2,500 beta exclusive testers
f)GameSpy's exclusive Public Beta test agreement
not to be funny but a professional company has more costs because they have extremely operations and are trying to capture a world market.
not to mention they have to higher the expensive "big" names as it were to make sure that the standards of these titles are upto the publicity that EA will be spending alot of money on.
But to be truthful they do nothing particularly spectacular that a dedicated smaller team could.
Look at Cambridge Studios for example, they have a team fo 25people - they're last release Primal was given outstanding acclaim, they've also done the Medevil series which was just great.
They're budget for Sony is within the $1million mark ... i think its actually around the $650k/year mark last time i heard, compaired to EA Pacific's $13million - that is barely anything.
And the returns that Cambridge bring back are actually pretty much on par with anyone elses.
The costs of development isn't actually going up, its what companies are willing to spend to make thier titles the biggest success which is.
I doubt the day of the bedroom developer is even far from over, because alot of bedroom developers are moving with the times as is the software thier using ... and it is just as easy as ever to create a professional level title to a budget as it was 10years ago. Sure gamers will expect graphics, but never at the cost of gameplay - no one buys a game just to look at.
Whilst reviewer will always be hasty to pan graphics (although to be honest i don't think they have a clue whats good graphics and what isn't) at the end of the day if your game is every bit as playable as seasoned games ... and you have the will to push it, with the internet it is easier than ever to get your game seen by millions of people without much effort.
The only things thats holding bedroom developers back is that most now aren't the same as they were 10years ago, most are thinking more about the graphics and less about the games themselves.
Games aren't a case of simply making a few alterations to someone elses title, or simply putting a cube in a world, they're alot of hard work - something the current generations just aren't really willing to do.
and to be perfectly honest, if we get alot of the game companies weeded out from 500 to 50 ... this will actually finally put games BACK on track. It will mean rather than just producing 600 titles of pure bilge with a single diamond in there somewhere, we will finally start to see developers becomming more and more talented and putting in far more work to achieve thier goals.
We will see developers truely creating games again than just trying to get your hard ernt cash out of your pocket and into thiers.
Once the field is thinned out this will quite frankly mean that we'll be back to how games were before the Playstation hit, we'll be seeing novel & new games ... alot more thought going into the players experience rather than simply relying on graphics to win over from the competitors.
