Is the nature of game development changing?
O’Meara: In the games industry, the cost of developing these games has risen dramatically: it costs around 30- to 40-million, USD, to develop a game. Five years ago it was around two to five million. Costs have increased substantially for a number of reasons. One is that the consumer expects a compelling story and a compelling video experience, which requires a lot more thought, effort, technology, and movie-like appearances in the game. So, that has obviously increased the cost significantly. Secondly, there is the increase in the cost of developing across these really advanced technical platforms, like PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, compared to the type of platforms we had five years ago. Thirdly, in game studios today there will be over 100 people working on a game. At a business level, Havok is providing one piece of software to work across a huge range of hardware that varies greatly in complexity: sophisticated PCs, sophisticated PlayStation 3 consoles with lots of special processin
