Thompson says devs will do things in a ”cleverer fashion” as ”they’ll be better prepared,” but there’s not going to be a ”ten-fold team increase again” like last time as that ”would just be ridiculous.”
Ridiculous and bankrupting. The BioWare director said you’d have to sell titles in the tens of millions to just break even if teams ballooned any more than they already do.
”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,” Neil Thompson told OXM. ”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 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 quite a big leap, but it won’t be as obvious,” Thompson continued. ”People will do things in a cleverer fashion - and I have to be careful here as there are non-disclosure agreements involved! 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.”
EA are using DICE’s Frostbite 2 engine a lot more these days with BioWare’s Dragon Age 3 powered by it, as they aim for a late 2013 release window. It’s speculated it will make it as a next-gen title. Baird Equity Research predicts the next PlayStation and Xbox will be out this October and November, in the $350 to $400 price range.