Once again, more profit does not equal less cost - or cheaper, IYW. They are spending much, much more to develop game technology now than they did in the 80's - but their profit margin allows them to do this.
Who are 'they'? It's not Activision, who is a publishing company. If anything, it's Infinity Ward, who sub-licensed tech from different companies to put the game together.
What you're getting confused is in licensing costs vs development costs.
A distinction I made in my very first post in this thread, and where I correctly pointed out that most of the incurred 'costs' where in sub-licensing tech because they didn't have it in-house.
Our company is one of 'they'... We have developed and licensed video game technology for companies like Midway a few years back. Just last year we developed and licensed video game tech used on a mul ude of mobile video games.
Quick trivia, do you know what arcade video game this source code header is from?
Code:
/*======================================================================*/
/* LE: KONG */
/* Function: kong specific routines */
/* */
/* First Edit: 7/22/93 */
/* Project #: 551xx */
/* Programmer: Dennis Harper */
/* */
/* COPYRIGHT 1993/1994 ATARI GAMES CORP. */
/* UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION, ADAPTATION, DISTRIBUTION, */
/* PERFORMANCE OR DISPLAY OF THIS COMPUTER PROGRAM OR */
/* THE ASSOCIATED AUDIOVISUAL WORK IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. */
/* ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. */
/* */
/*----------------------------------------------------------------------*/
I thought you were in the gaming industry? Someone in the industry would know:
a) that prices for developing gaming and technology have skyrocketed exponentially since the 80's. In no way, shape, or form has developing games or their techs gotten cheaper.
Wrong. The cost of licensing tech has increased, as it always has been a royalty. As the game market grew, so did the royalty to be paid.
This is completely different from the cost of developing the actual underlying tech. The only thing that has grown is amount of content (which is different from the tech). But again, the costs associated with that also have gone down considerably over the years. It's a lot easier to find and hire game artists and the costs of things like motion capture have also gone down over time as the technology has improved and gotten cheaper.
If you've got some links that demonstrate the contrary, feel free to show them. Otherwise, stop with the BS. Nothing you say can change a fact, regardless of your former employer.
You need to start reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine
Especially the 'History' and 'Recent trends' parts. I'll just highlight two portions from there:
Later games, such as Quake III Arena and Epic Games's 1998 Unreal were designed with this approach in mind, with the engine and content developed separately. The practice of licensing such technology has proved to be a useful auxiliary revenue stream for some game developers, as a single license for a high-end commercial game engine can range from US$10,000 to millions of dollars, and the number of licensees can reach several dozen companies (as seen with the Unreal Engine). At the very least, reusable engines make developing game sequels faster and easier, which is a valuable advantage in the compe ive video game industry.
Additionally, more game engines are being built upon higher level languages such as Java and C#/.NET (e.g. TorqueX, Blade3D, and Visual3D.NET) or Python (Panda3D). As most 3D rich games are now mostly GPU-limited (i.e. limited by the power of the graphics card), the potential slowdowns of higher level languages become negligible, while the productivity gains offered by these languages works to the game engine developers' benefit.[8][9] These recent trends are being propelled by companies such as Microsoft to support Indie game development on more platforms, such as Xbox360 and Zune using the .NET Framework and XNA for graphics and audio rendering. It is becoming easier and cheaper than ever to develop game engines for platforms that support managed frameworks.
b) that DLC's are much, much cheaper to develop than an actual game, are generally never mass produced due to their very nature (downloadable content), yet cost consumers 15-20% of a full game's price. Since you receive profits from game sales, you should know popular DLC's reap much higher profits per unit in comparison.
IOW, people downloading DLC actually is an area Activision can much easier live with. It's almost pure profit past the first 1000 downloads (estimate).
No argument from me that DLC's have a higher ROI for the publisher. However, keep in mind users must already own the game in order to use it.
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