Ingstein wrote:EvilTracer wrote:Not everyone look "just" for money.
It's 2012, it takes lots of qualified people, lots of time and thus money to develop a game nowadays. It's not 1982 when games were done overnight by a single person. So, in the end, money is the crucial factor.
Actually, the only relevance [AFAIK] that 2012 has on the difficulty of games is the absurd expectations of the 2012 market; the actual games are often [relatively] easier to make save for the extreme amount of content in some of them and the creation and Q&A time that that demands. In 1982 (even '92) DirectX did not exist, and you had to code for the specific platform and specific video card; and sometimes even the specific chipset of that brand of card (and you couldn't always check the version with code). One could not buy an engine like Flash or Dark Basic or download Unity3D or UDK for free; or acquire an advanced 3d modeler like Blender for free. Games in the mid 80's cost about what they do today
** [as did Desktops with 1 to 4 MB ram btw], and it often required
more low level understanding of the hardware ~~For each platform version (of which there were MANY).
Case in point: 'Legend of Grimrock' sold for $15 new, while '
Eye of the Beholder' sold for $50 new... and certainly wasn't made over night. Grimrock used Lua and DirectX middleware; EoB probably had to have that functionality coded in assembly; perhaps even specifically for that title... and then again for each CPU and video architecture. They sold if for Amiga, for IBM, for PCjr, Tandy... even for Sega and Nintendo ~later.
** Trivia: $49.95 in 1991 is equal to $81.23 in 2011. So an odd thing is that Skyrim's current day price of $59.95, is the equivalent cost of $36.87 back in 1991.
Also... the marketplace has changed from back then. A person can in fact code a game alone and make a fortune once again.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/shoot-is-iphone/