For those of you interested in cost to develop games

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>Found this while at IGN.DC

"This year, Sega will spend 14.5 billion yen on the development of the announced 118 titles. Next year and the year after that, this figure will increase to 15 billion and 16 billion yen respectively"

When you work out the math, it figures that each title gets about 122 million yen, or about $1 million US per game. I think it's pretty reasonable to say the bigger games will have a budget of tens of milliions since it's not like Sega's making 118 versions of Shen Mue or something like that.</div>

[Zeus]

<div style='font: 10pt "Arial bold", Modern; text-align: left; '>That's about average now. That's why we keep getting rehashes</div>

[Crono]

<div style='font: 12pt Arial, Modern; text-align: left; '>Yah, quite true. Each of the Squaresoft RPG's for PSX alone... had costed a couple million each time. Now that they have switched from FMV to realtime... I wonder how it'll effect costs in FFX.</div>

[Gilder]

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>Zelda Ocarina of Time had a budget of 10 million US, now THAT's a lot, but they knew it would be an alltime best seller by the hype for it alone.</div>

[Gilder]

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>and to all those people who are going to mention "You just HAD to bring up Zelda again" BITE ME!</div>

[Darx]

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>But that still doesn't say how it will sell. Since Sega has a name that's pretty recognizable it shouldn't be that bad. For a no-name company to spend 1 million on their initial product would be an extreme risk. Plus it may be more than just 1 mil. Who knows how much extra startup is needed.

I really do think the best way to get into the game business is Working Designs method. Get a name by other people's games, and go from there. Maybe I'll try that a couple years down the line...</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>For someone to let you do the translation for their game instead of translating the game themselves, that already says that the game won't be selling a lot, otherwise the company would've just done the translation themselves.

Now, you might get lucky in that something that wasn't popular in Japan happens to be a huge success in US, but that's pretty unlikely.</div>

[Torgo]

<div style='font: 9pt Arial, Modern; text-align: left; '>*chomp*</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", Modern; text-align: left; '>Hey, if all you know is Nintendo games...</div>

[Crono]

<div style='font: 12pt Arial, Modern; text-align: left; '>Well, that was kind of a low blow. He has posted similar stuff for all the systems... it's just that Nintendo was his favorite for a while.</div>