Corona | Coming Attractions

If you keep track of escalating budgets for Hollywood films then hearing a price tag of $200 million or more isn't that shocking anymore. However, in the world of video games, where an average Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 title can cost between $20 million to $30 million dollars, hearing speculation from one of the industry's leaders that the cost of making a game could be doubled for the next generation systems might give some developers a hammering heart.

But that's what the chairman of Ubisoft is saying. Yves Guillemot is predicting that for the next gaming systems coming in perhaps two to three years the cost of developing a first-rate title could balloon to $60 million dollars. To give a comparison, $60 million dollars was the average cost of a Hollywood movie back in 2005. Still, higher bills won't be the only thing that's going up. "The next generation is going to be so powerful that playing a game is going to be the equivalent of playing a CGI movie today," Guillemot told CNBC in an interview about the coming future of the industry.

Ubisoft is spending a pretty penny on making a video game out of James Cameron's Avatar, a movie that itself is rumored to be among the most costliest of all time. And with the three major video gaming console makers spending billions on marketing their present day systems there's significant risk in deciding to launch a new system during the lifespan of the one already known to the public. If games do spiral up in their production cost then there really is only one way for the makers to recoup their investment and that's in more expensive games and systems. The next three to five years will show whether Guillemot's prediction for bigger and better graphics and larger budgets come to pass.