Spector “a little scared” over potential production costs associated with future-gen

By Stephany Nunneley

Warren Spector has said he’s a bit worried high production values with future consoles could prevent companies from breaking even.

Speaking with Digital Spy, Spector said that while he’s more into design over tech, he’s “a little scared” that once “Pixar-quality graphics with interactivity,” are achieved, games could cost in upwards of $200 million to develop.

“Honestly? I don’t care much about hardware,” said Spector. “Nintendo games are some of the best games in the world and from a more graphical standpoint, the Wii can’t do what a PS3 or 360 can do. It’s about design and not so much about tech for me. Honestly, I’m more scared about what will come next than I am excited.

“Once we can do Pixar-quality graphics rendered in real time with interactivity, I could see games costing $200 million to make and all of a sudden you have to sell a lot of games just to break even, so I’m a little worried someone’s going to do that.

“Someone’s going to spend… well, there are already people spending $100 million on games, that’s not even insane anymore. $200, 300 million games, I’m a little scared about that, there aren’t a lot of companies that have the resources or the courage to spend that much. So my gut’s in a bit of a knot about that but whatever comes along I’ll just make games that work on that platform, I don’t think about hardware too much.”

Spector said platform power is starting to outstrip the size of the audience, and $150 is just too much to charge someone for a game.

“If you’re spending $200 million on a game and you’re making $60 on 20 million copies sold, oh wait, you’re losing money if you’re the best-selling game of all time basically, right? I don’t know how the business works anymore, that’s the problem,” he said.

“It already takes three years to make a game, when all of a sudden creating assets at an even higher level of quality and animations that are even a higher level of quality, I don’t know how we’re going to do it. We’ll figure it out but right now I’m content where I am.”

Epic Mickey 2 is out in the fall for Mac, PC, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360. A 3DS version subtitled Power of Illusion is in the works as well.