Capcom developer: next-gen games take 8-10 times more work to develop

"It's clear that heightened game quality leads to a rise in the number of man hours," Capcom's Senior Manager of Technology Management Masaru Ijuin said in an interview posted to the company's official website. "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."

Ijuin discussed the work he's doing on Capcom's new Panta Rhei engine for the Xbox One and Playstation 4, which Deep Down uses. It will replace its current MT Framework engine Capcom used to build all of its games for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

"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," Ijuin said "That's pretty much why we started developing this new engine."

He said that if the company decided to simply improve upon the MT Framework engine it might have been able to reduce the work time from one hour to 30 minutes, but that his goal is to shorten those 30 minutes to 10.

While Capcom will only use Panta Rhei for Xbox One and PS4 going forward, it will still use MT Framework for the Wii U, and a modified version of the engine for PS Vita, 3DS, and Smartphones.

You can find the full interview on Capcom's official site.