No Significant Development Cost Increase for PlayStation 4, Says Sony

Despite fears that video games for the next generation of consoles will be pricier for both developers and player, Sony suggests that it will be impossible to increase costs because the market would be unable to support them.

Michael Denny, the senior vice president of the Worldwide Studios at Sony Computer Entertainment, tells CVG that, “I think what we’re seeing anyway in the industry is a polarisation between the triple-A games at the top end, which are getting more and more budget going in to them and even on current-gen have a lot of resource and effort going in to them.”

He adds, “I think you’ll be surprised that with next-generation PlayStation 4 it’s not that much of a leap up, because these games on current-gen are already pushing things to the max in terms of resources you’re putting in to them.”

Neither Sony nor Microsoft has previously explained how much it costs to create a game for the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360.

But recently, a BioWare writer has suggested that if costs increased, an AAA title would need to sell upwards of 30 million copies in order to make a profit, which is almost impossible on the current depressed market.

During the reveal event for the PlayStation 4, Sony unveiled that Guerrilla Games was working on a new Killzone title called Shadow Fall.

The leadership of the company stated that developing for the PS4 was pretty similar in terms of costs to working on the previous generation of hardware and other companies have echoed the same idea.

The PlayStation 4 is designed to use the X86 architecture, with 8 GB of RAM and an advanced graphics processing unit.

This should make the porting process for the game easier than it was for the PlayStation 3 and its special Cell architecture.