PSP games cost almost 3x more to develop than DS games?

[classicb]

I was reading this article about how expensive it is to develop games for the Xbox and they listed the costs for other systems too. I was surpised to see how much it cost to develop for the PSP and how cheap it is for the DS even cheaper than the GBA. Is it me or does that just seem crazy. I hope this doesn't flood the DS with a bunch of crapy games since its so cheap to develop for.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=10815

[davidbrit2]

Debugging probably takes about 10 times as long with all the load times. Haw.

[Leo_A]

Read this at another site and it listed the number of games sampled for each platform to detirmine the cost.

The DS average came from 3 games I think it was.

This article was hardly newsworthy, but it's made it's way to several game sites anyways.

Edit- Here's the numbers for each game, this thing is a joke.

Xbox - 202 million yen ($1.8 million) / 13 titles
PlayStation 2 - 96 million yen ($877,634) / 194 titles
GameCube - 90 million yen ($822,857) / 11 titles
PlayStation Portable - 90 million yen ($822,857) / 6 titles
PlayStation - 80 million yen ($731,429) / 1 title
Game Boy Advance - 53 million yen ($484,571) / 47 titles
DS - 37 million yen ($338,286) / 3 titles
Dreamcast - 25 million yen ($228,571) / 2 titles

[classicb]

Read this at another site and it listed the number of games sampled for each platform to detirmine the cost.

The DS average came from 3 games I think it was.

This article was hardly newsworthy, but it's made it's way to several game sites anyways.

Edit- Here's the numbers for each game, this thing is a joke.

PlayStation Portable - 90 million yen ($822,857) / 6 titles

DS - 37 million yen ($338,286) / 3 titles

Obviously not great research data but depending on what 3 games and 6 games they were it's still a big difference.

[Jumpman Jr.]

I guess that should mean that DS titles should be significantly cheaper than PSP games.
Is that the case? Of coarse not.

[GobopopRevisited]

Yeah but aren't Sony and other publishers losing money for selling games at this "low" price? Didn't Sony originally announce PSP game prices to range between 29.99 - 89.99-ish?

I've read a lot of articles stating this whole PSP being more expensive to develop too... I believe a few developers commented on that issue in the recent state of the Handheld Industry series at Nintendo Insider.

[chrisbid]

I guess that should mean that DS titles should be significantly cheaper than PSP games.
Is that the case? Of coarse not.

most DS games i see are 30 bucks, while PSP games range from 40-50.

id say 25 percent is significant

[Jumpman Jr.]

I guess that should mean that DS titles should be significantly cheaper than PSP games.
Is that the case? Of coarse not.

most DS games i see are 30 bucks, while PSP games range from 40-50.

id say 25 percent is significant

Here, its usually 39.99 for a new DS game and 44.99 for a new PSP game. I guess Canada has wacked out prices.

[fishsandwich]

This article states that the DS is cheaper to develop for than the GBA?



Exactly how is that possible? The DS contains the same set of processing chips found in the GBA (backwards compatible) PLUS the 3D hardware that's specific to the DS.

I've read that a small team (8 people or less) can put together a GBA game... does that mean the DS requires even less of a team?

According to the article, the average GBA game costs more than half what it costs to develop the average PS2 game?

Something in the water does not compute.

[Needle]

The data given does not seem to be significant enough to draw conclusions of any sort. A cross section of 6 titles (or three even) is not large enough to really identify an average cost.

For the sake of argument though, the jump in budget from a DS game to a GBA game may just be indicative of their current platform age. As the platform matures (for instance, the GBA) titles become more complex and thus would require a larger budget to produce. In additon, with the DS still in its first generation of games, perhaps their incomplexity correlates with their lower budget. It's all just hypothetical, of course.

On a final note, due to the low number of sources used, one strange title could definitely pull down an average. For instance, what if one of the three DS titles is Super Mario? Here we've got a popular launch title from one of the most loved franchises ever. Now consider that it's a port of an already established title. The budget would go into translation to the DS medium and programming for dual screen and touch screen abilities. I think it's safe to say that the budget here was probably pretty low, and it's possible that it could seriously affect any "average" when the pool of information is so thin.

Just some thoughts.

[Slimedog]

Yeah, it would kind of hose their average if the one Dreamcast game they used was Shenmue.