Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 will be great for gamers, but they will certainly add costs and development time for those who make the games.
According to a report from GamesIndustry on Thursday, Pauline Jacquey, who is the new managing director of Ubisoft Reflections, talked about how they will need to factor in the added costs of developing on new systems.
"Totally. We actually started making simulations three years ago on next-gen because we knew that it would require probably a multiplication of data by two or four, meaning bigger teams.
"But it depends on the type of thing that you do, there are games that Ubisoft specialises in like open world action games with a lot of production value, and you do need a team of 400 to 600 people, that's a lot, and next-gen is increasing this.
"And then some systemic games you can probably afford to do a next-gen game with 100 people. Ubisoft are very generous with resources, making sure product quality is top notch, so it's got a big influence on budget.
"But then the outcome, the production revenue, should be much higher as well so it balances. It's just the risk is higher, so if we miss it once or twice the impact is big," Jacquey said.
Jacquey then talked about how the new social and sharing features of the PS4 will impact the workload of developing a game.
"It does, except that this is not a surprise. Everybody in the senior management in Ubisoft probably guessed three or four years ago, seeing the success of iPhone and Facebook and Twitter, etc. that we needed to incorporate this in our designs.
"Young players today who are 18 years old, they were born with Facebook, and I'm very sure that the neuro connections in their brain are different because of this. And plus it's fun, you can be in touch with your friends.
"I've shipped two Facebook games. It's not what I want to do in the future but I'm sure that I'm taking the best of Facebook games into the games that I'm producing right now.
"So not a surprise, we were waiting for something like this to take shape, we knew that social communities and sharing was very important in next-gen," Jacquey said.
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