Infinity Blade 3 cost only “a little more” than original

By Brenna Hillier

Infinity Blade 3 took Chair Entertainment at least twice as long to develop as the last entry, but apparently wasn’t much more expensive.

Speaking to GamesIndustry, Chair boss Donald Mustard said the first Infinity Blade took four months to make, and Infinity Blade 2 took six months. Infinity Blade 3, on the other hand, has already been in the works for about a year.

“We wanted to increase the scope substantially and see how far we could push not only the devices, but find out how much game you could create in a mobile device,” Mustard said of the extra development time.

The executive wouldn’t be drawn on how much the game cost to make, but said it wasn’t substantially more than the original Infinity Blade’s $2 million – “A little more, but not that much,” he said.

“We enjoy very high margins. We’re doing just fine. Yeah, making an Infinity Blade game isn’t as expensive as making a console game, but it isn’t cheap,” he added.

Chair, a subsidiary of Epic Games, uses Unreal Engine to make some of the prettiest games on the App Store. That costs a lot more than the cheap, low-fi graphics seen in competing titles, but Mustard said Chair doesn’t care about maximising its profits.

“There are certainly games in the app store that invest significantly less money than it costs to make an Infinity Blade-production value game that enjoy even greater monetary success than we do, but to us, it’s not all about that. We’re trying to create what we think is the ultimate expression of what these amazing computers we carry in our pockets can do,” he said.

Infinity Blade 3 was announced during a recent Apple event showing off the iPhone 5C and 5S; check out the first gameplay teaser. It’s due on September 18 for $7, and will be compatible with most recent iDevice models but has been optimised for the new iPhones.

In the full interview, available through the link above, Mustard makes some interesting comments about Apple’s continuing threat to the console space, noting that when the iDevice install base reaches 1 billion, even “if only a small slice of that audience has a controller, that’s still going to be more controllers in hands than any console has ever had”.