production-cost
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Heavy Rain cost $52 million but made $130 million, you do the math
Heavy Rain cost developer Quantic Dream $21.8 million to make, and with Sony's marketing budget added in, production costs topped out at $52.2 million (based on a mid-range euro-dollar exchange rate of $1.31), Quantic CEO Guillaume de Fondaumiere tells Eurogamer. It was worth it in the end – Heavy Rain made Sony more than $130.6 million."It's very profitable," Fondaumiere says. Since there seems to be a wide discrepancy between the definition of "successful" in AAA and smaller games, it's always good to know that yes, more than $100 million is still "profitable" to some developers.
The Soapbox: MMOs waste millions on voice-over
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. A-list voice actors are not new to the video game genre. Over the last 20 years, video games have pulled from the same pool of talent as cartoons and commercials. But it really wasn't until last year with DC Universe Online that we started to see MMOs advertise the voice talent they had in the games. DCUO filmed multiple documentary-style videos to impress us with the level of voice-over work the game had. Although DCUO was the first fully voiced MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic made a point to tell us that it had over 200 different voice actors (300 if you believe IMDB) with over a thousand recording sessions for over 200,000 lines of dialogue. In the end, what's the pay-off? Six months after launch, the majority of players will threaten to leave a SWTOR pick-up group if the other players don't skip over the dialogue. Although a large portion of players did watch all the dialogue shortly after the game launched, all the players I spoke to said that the cutscenes started to grate on them before they'd even reached level 50. And even though DCUO was the first MMO to be fully voiced, SWTOR got away with advertising that it was first mainly because voice-overs were considered so insignificant by the MMO community that almost no one noticed the fib. And dare we even talk about the expense of recording 200,000 lines of dialogue? Is fan excitement over, say, Mark Hamill's Joker worth the cost of bringing him in on the project in the first place?
Sony cuts PlayStation 3 production cost in half
In a piece primarily focused on Blu-ray over at Business Week, a bit of scrolling led to quite the interesting tidbit: Sony has apparently been able to slash the production cost of its PlayStation 3 in half. More specifically, it was noted that the firm has been able to "shrink the PS3's chips and tweak its design," which aided in getting the cost per machine "to around $400 now, from above $800 just before it went on sale in November 2006." According to Nikko Citigroup's Kota Ezawa, the biggest culprit for such an improvement is the "reduction in the parts count." Still, we wouldn't get our hopes up for yet another price cut just yet, but at least things are moving in the right direction.[Via PS3Fanboy]
*Updated* PS3 and Xbox 360: production cost comparison
The recent announcement of increased production for blu-ray diodes used in the PS3 increased speculation that a price-cut for the PS3 may be coming sooner rather than later. After all, cheaper production costs equate to cheaper overall manufacturing costs and then, a price cut to incite a resurgence in product interest, right? Well, taking a look at the production cost comparison, it seems Sony may need to bring costs down on a few other key areas of their PS3 console before they consider a price-cut. In comparison, a few months after the 360 launched, cost production estimates were similarly expensive (sans built-in wireless and inclusive next-gen DVD drive). Don't worry fans, we'll get our price cut. Eventually.[Via 1P Start]*Update*The data that Digitimes released today was from the November 2006 report that iSuppli released last year. The 360 model in the above chart is NOT the Elite, nor is that the current cost of either console. From GameDaily:"iSuppli public relations manager Jonathan Cassell informed GameDaily BIZ that Digitimes compiled the data from last November's report and erroneously labeled it as May data."[Via GameDaily]
