PS3 theme sales won't cover development costs – Q Games
But PixelJunk boss proud of involvement in creating animated backgrounds
Q Games president Dylan Cuthbert has said that the studio will be "lucky" to sell enough Dynamic Themes on the PlayStation Store to cover development costs.
Introduced with the new 3.0 firmware, Dynamic Themes are interactive backgrounds for the PlayStation 3. The developer has just released a theme to promote PixelJunk Monsters, priced USD 2.99.
"Remember that we’ll be lucky to sell even a few thousand themes and so the cost of developing the theme (3-4 weeks of coder/artist time, checking, testing etc) will still far exceed any money we make from it," said Cuthbert, writing on the PS3 blog.
However, Cuthbert said his team was proud to work on themes with Sony, as it has been something they have had a hand in developing.
"We’re proud to say that this is a system we were involved in developing. Sony Computer Entertainment wanted to spice up the background a bit and static pictures just didn’t cut the mustard.
"So we collaborated with them to make a system where developers can display what they want and animate and move them around. This definitely adds a little life to the PS3’s background," he wrote.