Xbox most expensive console to develop for

In Japan, at least

By Aaron McKenna: Tuesday 16 August 2005, 14:21

THE Japanese Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association has reported that in Japan the Xbox is the most expensive system to develop for.
28 companies voluntarily disclosed their figures to the association, revealing that the average cost of producing an Xbox game is 202 million yen ($1.82 million) as opposed to 96 million yen ($877,000) to develop a game for the PS2, making the Xbox on average just short of $1 million more expensive to develop for.

The report also revealed that PSP and GameCube games both cost around 90 million yen ($822,000) to develop, while Game Boy Advance titles generally cost about 53 million yen ($484,000) with Nintendo's DS being the cheapest to develop for at only 37 million yen ($338, 286) a pop. µ

A lot of people assume for various reasons that I’m anti-Microsoft because of the OpenGL versus D3D stance. I’d actually like to speak quite a bit in praise of Microsoft in what they’ve done on the console platform, where the xbox previously and now the 360 have the best development environment that I’ve ever seen on a console. I’ve gone a long ways back through a number of different consoles and the different things that we’ve worked with, and Microsoft does a really, really good job because they are a software company and they understand that software development is the critically important aspect of this, and that is somewhat of a contrast to Nintendo and Sony, and previously Sega, who are predominantly hardware companies, and decisions will get made based on what sounds like a good idea in hardware rather than what is necessarily the best thing for the developers that are actually going to be making the titles.

So it was interesting to see with the following generation, that Sony kind of flip flopped with the Playstation 2, where you now had low level hardware details documented and all this, but you were back to this multi-core, not particularly clean hardware architecture.

And then Microsoft came out with the xbox which had an extremely clean development environment, the best we’ve really seen on a console to date, but you didn’t get the absolute nitty-gritty low-level details of the 3D system on there. And I know Microsoft actually, there’s a lot of bickering back and forth about “was it NVidia’s fault or Microsoft’s fault” or whatever on there, but still it was a clear advantage for developers. If you ask developers that worked on xbox and PS2, the xbox is just a ton nicer to develop for.

So it’s been interesting to see that Microsoft has had a good deal of success, but they haven’t been able to overtake Sony’s market dominance with the earlier release of the PS2.