Raymond: Rising dev costs will stifle innovation

Rising development costs will eventually stifle innovation in games, says the head of Ubisoft Toronto.

Speaking to Digital Spy, Jade Raymond said as expectations rise with ever-more powerful hardware, it is tougher to take risks when developers are spending in excess of $100 million to create a triple-A game.

“That’s for sure one of the things that is going to stifle innovation eventually,” she said.

“Anytime you want to make a big triple-A, you’re spending, let’s say $100 million, you’re not going to want to take a chance. It’s got to be, I’m making the next Call of Duty or the Assassin’s Creed and I know it’s going to make ‘X’ amount, so we’ll make money. I think that’s the tougher thing."

Raymond added to help reduce costs and allow creativity to flourish, studios needed to invest in tools to make developers more efficient at their jobs.

She explained that devs needed to find a way to produce ten times as much content as before to meet increased expectations and keep costs under control as game’s get bigger.

"I think it depends on what type of game you’re making, but all games I think we have to invest in tools to make people more efficient, to perhaps make ten times the amount of content that we were making before with the same amount of effort," she said.

"That’s the only way we’re going to keep up. So there has to be a big investment there. The other side of things is we have to investigate some of the different business models.

"The reality is the industry is changing, the way people are consuming games is changing, the expectations are changing.”