Hi all, We are moving to a seek funding for console development. We are looking for information about the games. Some questions: 1. how much costs a license from Ninetndo/Sony for GameCube, PS2, and most importnat, GameBoy? 2. What is the royalties we gonna pay to them? is it for each title? Thanks for _any_ info... thanks Lior

It doesn''t cost anything to become a licensed developer - BUT the console companies wont grant developer status to just anyone. You must have industry experience or have a deal with an approved publisher.

The developer license does not cost anything but the development kit does (around $10k).

You don''t pay a royalty, the publisher does.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant

As Dan said, the above plus:

- You need to have a publisher deal for the title, always if this is your first console title. The publisher will need to get concept approval, and this goes through the publisher in nearly all cases. So a standalone new developer has little to no chance of being approved unless you have signed a development deal with a publisher.

- Like Dan says, a dev. kit costs around 10,000 USD each. But unless you can program your own engine for PS2 (ahem..), you need to add about 50-100K USD to that for an engine like RenderWare. Add another 50K or so for a sound engine, movie engine, whatever you need extra.

In all, I would say that unless you are signed to an approved publisher, you''d need an experienced team of 10+ people, and at least 150,000USD for equipment and license fees just to get started seriously. And then Sony and Microsoft will need to approve your game first, which means you need to have the game nailed down first.

Console development is a lot more expensive to get started in than PC.


Mark

quote: Original post by Mark Tanner
As Dan said, the above plus:

- Like Dan says, a dev. kit costs around 10,000 USD each.

Mark

I know the PS2 dev kits (monster things that they are) cost around 10,000 euros but the xbox dev kits are relativly cheap at around 1000 euros.

The support from microsoft suprisingly is very good for the xbox compared with sonys support and tools for the ps2.

But thats the easy bit - to buy one like whats been mentioned you have to be a registered developer.

Not sure about the gamecube, probably similar to the ps2 in pricing.

That''s the debug kit you''re talking about at 1000 USD the dev. kit is 10,000 just like Sony''s..

As Mark said. 1,000 euros or 1,000 dollars will get you just the debig kit. That is enough to put together a demo for a publisher but not develop a full title. It is the debug station that Microsoft give to teams in the incubator program. Just enough for them to make a demo and get a publisher interested. Once a publisher is onboard they can become a full registered developer.

The full dev kit is 10k.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant

Developer licencing does technically cost. For instance if you wish to be in control of pressing your game, as say a publisher does they generally need to foot a down payment on pressing a minimum number of dics (usually a run of 10,000 minimum at about 5-10 dollars each.)

The cost of SDKs vary enourmously. The PS2 devkits are around the 10K USD, the Xbox is about the same, but a Nintendo licence is vastly different and can be much more expensive because it includes Nintendo licensing and development kits. The PS2 also has a test kit or debug kit at about 1K which can be quite useful in development. A proper Nintendo Gameboy licence and SDK is also not cheap (about 8K per seat I think). You can use the hack kits etc, but obviously Nintendo wont be happy you did that :-)

As for support- as mentioned by PantherBoy, thats obviously agruable. I would suggest from my personal experiences that Sony dev support is excellent - we had 24 hour turn around for fixes and problems. And their tech forum is the best by far. The XBox support I can honestly say is much like the normal Microsoft support but slightly better. Nintendo - their support is very good.

The development kits and tools, well all depends on how you look at it here too. The Xbox obviously uses MSVC. There are compilers and such that come with the Sony Devkit as part of package as does the GameCubes. There are ''better'' packages that can be bought to compile and build with. For instance SN Systems have excellent tools for both PS2 and GameCube. The PS2 compiler linker actually can be used with MSVC - so that sort of cancels and advantage the Xbox has. The debugging facilities on the GameCube are cool :-) Lines everywhere.. But like everything they are each fairly different, none really better or worse than the other (although many people think the GC API is brilliant - it is pretty good :-) ) and also the Gameboy, thats a whole different story with devkits and sdks mainly because you are (should) be writing in assembly most of the time. There are some good C/C++ compilers, but theres nothing like doing asm to get those few extra clocks out.

All consoles have middleware that can be used to help develop a game. Renderware is actually available on all three platform and its good if you want rapid development and also publishers are alot more comfortable signing teams who use well known products. Renderware is a bit different in that it has systems for pretty much all components of a game - gfx, sound, ai, physics and resource generation and management.
www.renderware.com - Although it does cost, it saves enormous dev time - so all depends on how you tackle your development stream.

There are many other types of middleware available for sound, gfx, ai, physics and such seperatelty. Seartch google for middleware console and middleware type for a list :-)

The most important thing about heading to console is previous experience on your target console. You need to have a solid business plan, and formal game development documents that you can present to the publisher you wish to try and get a deal with.
Heres some links to these sorts of docs.
http://www.igda.org/biz/
Read them thoroughly, they are excellent documents and provide invaluable information about how to tackle development issues. And most of these docs have been written by publishers too.

Finally, royalties. Well that depends on how you wish to structure your agreement with your publsiher. Some agreements are purely milestone and completion payments only. That means for the duration of the development of the title the developer is paid based on their performance to achieve milstones and reach completion. Some contracts have that plus a royalty once sales reach an expected amount. Say after the first 100,000 sales the publisher will pass on a royalty for every extra copy sold. And some contracts are more royalty bound and the developer foots the cost of creating the title - although this is not as common anymore.

My suggestion, is that unless you have some insane technology or alot of money backing you, stick to a simple milestone agreement and possibly a royalty based on sales.

And another tip. Get a demo together. Most publishers wont even look at you these days if you dont have some form of demostration of your game for a startup company. It becomes very different once you have completed a couple of quality titles.

quote: Original post by Grover
Developer licencing does technically cost. For instance if you wish to be in control of pressing your game, as say a publisher does they generally need to foot a down payment on pressing a minimum number of dics (usually a run of 10,000 minimum at about 5-10 dollars each.)

Sorry but it isn''t correct to say that developer licensing costs money if you want to be a publisher. Publisher licensing and developer licensing are two different things altogether. Developer licensing does not cost money (although buying kit does).

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant

Guys

Thanks a lot. That helps enourmosuly.