Posted Mon Feb 10, 2014 at 09:15 AM PST by Brian Hoss
"the nail in the coffin" was 'Gran Turismo 6' on the PS3.
Eutechnyx, developer of 'NASCAR '14,' has shed some light on their thinking behind skipping the Xbox One and PS4 this year. Eutechnyx's EVP, Ed Martin gave Sports Illustrated: Extra Mustard a two pronged explanation, which focuses on a development cost for the a next-gen version and the comparative size of the install base.
"We took a good, hard look at it, (Xbox One and PS4 versions) but there just isn't enough hardware out there yet to justify the cost of development. The nail in the coffin was when a guy from Sony talked about Gran Turismo, and how their new game was launching on PS3. He said something like, 'Why would we put Gran Turismo on a console that has zero units in the market when there are 150 million PlayStation 3s out there?' Well, it's a great question. It costs us about $6 million to develop a next-gen version of NASCAR. You have to sell an awful lot of copies in order to meet the development costs, on top of all the licensing. There are about 4-5 million worldwide combined units of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, so it just doesn't add up for us right now. We own the rights, and we absolutely have plans, but it won't be later this year."
Of course the "4-5 million" number for Xbox One and PS4 units is short of the recent 7-8 million numbers from the two console makers, but $6 million cost for next-gen versions may be more interesting. That number may be specific to licensing, and simply hitting "build" on next-gen versions. Without next-gen features of any sort, many games risk the ire of those new install bases, and it may be another year or two before attitudes like Eutechnyx's change.
Source: VG247
Author: Brian Hoss
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