With news regarding studio closures becoming startingly more frequent, it's no wonder that some people are already wary of impending development costs for next-gen.
Well, if Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick is to be believed, development games for the Xbox 720 and PS4 might even be easier and cheaper to produce.
During Take-Two's earnings call, Zelnick notes that he doesn't expect operating expenses to increase when the next-generation of consoles come around.
We don't have a ramp-up of operating expenses for next-generation…Like everyone else in the business except one of our competitors, once we reach technical feasibility we capitalise our software development and at that point it no longer hits our P&L [profit and loss] until we release a title. So we wouldn't expect our operating expenses to increase.
And I think I'll answer a question you didn't necessarily pose, which is, do we believe that titles to be a whole lot more expensive to make for next-gen, and the answer is we do not. In many instances we believe that it may be somewhat easier to make titles for next-gen depending on how the technology comes together.
Of course, this isn't an assurance that next-gen development will be cheaper, but seeing as Take-Two is one of the biggest publishers in the world, I'd like to think that Zelnick knows a bit more than what he's letting on.
This is certainly a ray of good news not only for publishers, but for studios, too. Here's to hoping this translates to lesser studio closures and to more studios taking risks, no?
Thanks, Videogamer
