Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 have both been thought to not be bringing any increases in development costs, but one gaming developer says in order for these new systems to truly improve graphics, costs will need to be higher.
According to a report from VG24/7 today, BioWare art and animation director Neil Thompson talked about how it really is inevitable for developers to hit a limit with what they can do on consoles, and this generation is only a matter of time.
"Clearly we still hammer up against the limitations of the hardware on a daily basis and if you push those parameters back, as I’m sure the next-gen will do, we’ll hit them again.
"I think the main thing is that the industry doesn’t get itself into a corner where it becomes economically unviable to make a game.
"The last technology iteration caught folks by surprise – especially the number of people you needed and the skillset jump that was required to do the work that people expected.
"In the last generation the perception was that it was going to be a ten times improvement over the previous generation. For the next generation there will be a big leap, but it won’t be as obvious
“People will do things in a cleverer fashion. I think they’ll be better prepared, shall we say – but we can’t see a ten-fold team increase again as the budgets would just be ridiculous. You’d have to sell 20-30 million copies before you broke even," Thompson said.
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