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* Games are becoming more expensive to produce.

The current generation consoles, particularly the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, have more advanced graphic capabilities than previous consoles.

Taking advantage of those capabilities requires a larger team size than games on earlier, simpler consoles.

In order to compete with the best games on these consoles, there are more characters to animate ; all characters must be modeled with a higher level of detail ; more textures must be created ; the entire art pipeline must be made more complex to allow the creation of normal maps and more complex programming code is required to simulate physics in the game world, and to render everything as precisely and quickly as possible.

On this generation of consoles, games commonly require budgets of US $ 15 million to $ 20 million.

Activision's Spider-Man 3, for example, cost US $ 35 million to develop, not counting the cost of marketing and sales.

Every game financed is, then, a large gamble, and pressure to succeed is high.