If you recall that interview with Warren Spector a few days ago, you might recall him saying something to the extent of "A game developer's biggest challenge nowadays is utilizing all the hardware that's available, and not exceeding the budget and development time."

That's not a quote, but it went something along those lines. With processors now already passing the 3Ghz mark, and graphics cards capable of doing jawdropping stuff, a developer either chooses to do all the work themselves, and thereby running a 14 year development cycle (Duke Nukem Forever?) which costs 10+ million dollars (which is almost impossible to recoup), or by licensing engines for whatever they need in their game.

It wouldn't surprise me to see a few companies just doing engines in say 3-5 years time, and everybody else just licensing those engines and making games with them.

Still, even with that, eventually they are going to come up against a ceiling I think. Gamers keep asking for more gameplay, better graphics, more weapons, more special moves, better storylines, better sound, more levels, more voiceovers etc, but still expect the price of those games to be 50 dollars or less.
I know that I felt quite surprised when I saw NWN was 55 bucks...

That trend can't go on, can it? Eventually it has to give out somewhere. ID software can afford to spend whatever amount of money on their new Doom 3 game because they know they will recoup their money by licensing the engine, but how does a Raven Software, for example, keep increasing everything without eventually coming to that point where sales will no longer recoup their costs? (Licensing is ofcourse an option, but I think even that will eventually not cut it anymore)

Quite curious what people think of this matter

Creston