I’m not speaking as a console gamer.

Ha, hahahaha.

Just to play devil’s advocate, it’s rarely worth it to work on a fully-fledged PC port when there’s vastly (vastly is really understating it) more things that can go wrong.

And most of them won’t have entry-level salaries. Most of them will have double than that, and the overhead support for them to work doubles the already doubled salary.

Well he certainly hasn’t had just one.

I don’t even.

Those are twelve people in a larger company that could be using those twelve people for something else, like making a new game that could actually make their salaries back.

Per year. Per game salary is usually more of a contract worker deal in most instances. You’ll find these sorts as interns, the QA staff, and programmers/artists that are used to outsource work as needed. Permanent members of a development company go by a standard salary like anyone else.

An average starting salary for a developer is around $50-70k. Consider a team of about 50, and then factor in about 4-7 months of work.

There have been text-based online games that have certainly come close, although they literally lack an extra dimension of Eve. They have the political side down.

So it’s the Karma of another game then?

While Sean Bean and Lena Headey are popular, they probably aren’t going to cost a significant amount of money. Furthermore, Square Enix is likely producing this at least in part with external partners, so even if the budget was a hundred million, they wouldn’t be paying that much out-of-pocket.

I’ve seen a lot of money lost trying to port something to PC. I wouldn’t be nearly as sure.

What gives you the idea that a direct-to-video CG movie is going to cost them hundreds of millions?

Easier, but not easy. Furthermore any game (or more accurately game engine) that was in development before a certain date won’t be able to use the latest features, because upgrading will always break something, which you don’t do when you’re finalizing a product.

Flag on the field: Oversimplification of a very complicated issue. Same CPU architectures make it easier, not easy.

I’m willing to bet that Square Enix is partnered with several other companies to produce both the anime series and the CG movie that are helping to foot the bill, as is the common practice in Japanese productions. That’s a much safer business decision than redirecting already tasked resources to producing more…

Bingo.

Switching between computer generated segments and live segments is incredibly jarring in most instances. The only exception I can think of is the Command & Conquer series, largely because it’s a strategy game. You don’t really see the people on the ground, just the battlefield.

Errr, those both were independent ideas by two companies that Valve bought. If I’m not mistaken, both teams that worked on them have moved on from Valve since they released the games.