This article may be a bit old, but it's still relevent to today. I especially like Mark's views that the prices of games should be going down, and not up. Here are a few quotes that i like:
Mark Rein concerning Blu-Ray:
"Unreal Tournament was 6GB compressed. Next Generation games are going to be 20GB plus, and how we're going to fit them on DVD9's I don't know, they'll probably be a few of them. On the PS3, we're going to be using the majority of the space on those Blu-ray disks."
Mark Rein thinks that the prices of games should be going DOWN, not up:
"I hate to hear people talk about "We're going to charge more because it costs more". Sure, it costs more because you're developing using better technology and making better games. Not just because you're wasting money developing your own tools...
...there's other technology you can buy, not just ours. People who are trying to re-invent the wheel are spending way more money than they should. Our own games, we're seeing a 30-50% increase in cost, but we're expanding our teams and make much better games.
UT 2007...[is] not processed three times, and it's not costing us 30 million USD. There's no excuse for us to raise the price....When we worked with Atari, they sold our games for $39 and we actually agree with that policy. Reduce the price of our game, not increase it.
It's a little more difficult to do that on consoles because you're paying royalties to the manufacturers, but you're paying royalties to subsidise the machine and marketing. If we were able to share with them the money they make from rentals and retail, that could help lower the price. I hate hearing people want to raise the price....My point is that if we can make it more affordable, we can grow the market. One of the ways we can do that is to use Unreal Engine 3 and take advantage of the productivity gains you can take from that."
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