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The per-game research and development costs associated with developing on the PlayStation 4 will likely be five to 10 percent higher than equivalent development on current generation systems, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said during an investors conference call earlier this week.
"On any one title, it might be five to 10 percent increases in cost, but the real opportunity comes with the ability to expand what you can do in that title," Jorgensen said. "Overall you might see larger titles or larger costs because of the capability that you can deal with, but we'll also see larger revenue streams, we believe, because of the excitement around some of those big titles."
EA has yet to officially determine whether these increased production costs will translate to increased retail costs, though Jorgensen made such an eventuality sound unlikely: "Typically at the start of a cycle, you've seen the pricing raise say to $69 for a core piece of software, and then over the life of those they've stripped it down to an introduction price typically now around $59. We haven't yet set pricing on our gen four [games], but you'll probably see a similar trend to that during the start of the next cycle."
Jorgensen misspoke, according to EA, and actually meant to say that current-gen games start at $59 and are reduced to $49, and that's a trend we're likely to see continue. This aligns with SCEA CEO Jack Tretton's assertion that PS4 games will cost between $0.99 and $60.
