BioWare has come out to ruin everyone’s fun by saying that they don’t believe the next-gen leap would be that massive and it shouldn’t take a lot to develop games otherwise it will be difficult to break even.
“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,” BioWare art and animation director Neil Thompson told OXM UK.
“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 that was required 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 a big leap, but it won’t be as obvious.”
He also issued a warning to the industry.
“People will do things in a cleverer fashion. 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.”
BioWare announced Dragon Age 3 last year and revealed that it will be running on DICE’s Frostbite 2.
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