KKLEIN wrote:Shadow wrote:Not really, if it uses face scanning of actors it shouldn't be any more expensive than mocap. As the graphics in games get better the technology to create the graphics gets better, it's massive environments that are expensive to create, making good looking environments should be easy and cheap enough for any dev.
Eh? The costs of game development has gone up with each passing console cycle.
Whereas the average budget for a PSone title was at anything from £75,000 to a million, a game on the PS3 or 360 is
£8 million.
Very few games cost £8Million.
Making good looking graphics is easy and cheap, games are so much bigger these days, that's what takes the time and money it's the scale of the games more than the visual quality, games are so much bigger that devs need more staff to create the content, not because it's harder/more expensive to make, but because you need more of it.
For example, I have a friend who's a freelance car modeller for games, he's done all the NFS and PGRs and it takes him the same amount of time to do a car for NFS:PS as it did for NFS:U (about 40 hours). Everything now needs voice acting to a high quality, all the middleware that today's games have (external renderer, engine, physics etc), everything needs to be licensed these days too, you can't just have one guy doing all your audio on his own and have a bunch of imaginary cars and guns (I realise some games do). Also advertising budgets are massive these days, compared to even five years ago, that'll all be included in the dev cost figures that you see. One thing that is incredibly time consuming though is facial animations, this process would probably make that a lot easier, I think they actually do the animations for you and just give you the animation files (just like an external mocap studio) I can't see that would be particularly expensive, no more so than what a dev would be paying their facial animators at the moment.