Capcom: Next-gen games require eight-to-ten times more development

The amount of work needed to produce a PS4 or Xbox One game is vastly more than was seen with the previous-gen machines.

That’s according to Capcom’s senior manager of technology management at its consumer games department Masaru Ijuin, who said on the Capcom blog:

It’s clear that heightened game quality leads to a rise in the number of man hours. The amount of work involved in making games for next-gen consoles is eight to ten times greater than what is required for the current generation of consoles.”

The comments come in an explanation of why Capcom has chosen to develop a new ‘Panta Rhei’ engine.

At Capcom we have been using our original development engine, which is called MT Framework, to make games and improve the efficiency and quality of development,” Ijuin added. However, we have run into some problems and limitations while using this framework.

Looking ahead to the development of games for next-gen consoles, we felt we needed to completely overhaul the development environment to better cope with the increasingly complex hardware. That’s pretty much why we started developing this new engine.

Upgrading MT Framework was definitely an option, and there were people in the company who were a little hesitant about developing a new engine. But taking the easy route often fails to bring about the best results. Improvements to MT Framework might have reduced the work time from one hour to 30 minutes. We sought to go beyond that and shorten those 30 minutes to ten.”