Cost of developing games for next gen consoles could exceed $15million

Sony has recently acquired SN Systems and formed alliances with Ageia Technologies, Havok and Epic Games in an attempt to provide PS3 platform developers with development tools essential for developing games for their next generation platform.

Analysts estimate the current cost of developing a console game (for PS2 or the XBox) is currently around $10million. Due the expected massive improvements in graphics and processing power of the next gen platforms like the PS3 and the XBox360, it is estimated that the average development cost may increase to between $15 to $20 million.

The agreement with Epic Games is to make the Unreal Engine 3 available to PS3 developers as an evaluation version, which can enable developers get up and running from day one of new development on the new platform.

Havok produce an advanced physics and animation engine, and Ageia PhysX SDK (also known as NovodeX) is a software development kit. All of these products are to be bundled in the SDK from Sony.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.