PS4: Development Costs Have Doubled

Playing in the vastly improved new gamescape of the two upcoming (rumored) consoles, Xbox 720 and PS4, will set developers back. Well, developing games for these platforms have always been costly-specially if the game being developed is a large scale game.

However, this cost dynamic is going to ramp up even more with the rumored release of the two new successor consoles, the Xbox 720 and PS4. According to an anonymous developer who has been working with the Xbox developer kit for the next generation Xbox, anticipates that the development budgets will double or even triple. Why? These new consoles have high fidelity models and their texture packs are different. While this might seem plausible at a shallow level, you have to only look at current development costs and see that this does not have to be the case. There are low-cost development tools like IPI Software, Cubic Motion, Epic’s UDK, and a whole list of budget-soothing tool sets for current console technology. It would not be unreasonable to expect such tools to be updated to accommodate the next next generation of consoles.

Waiting for the Playstation 4 (Credit: flickr.hyku)

Even if, for the sake of argument, development costs do spike up, the competitive pressure among tool kit manufacturers will make sure that this is a temporary affair. That’s the beauty of a relatively open and highly creative international market.

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