kars on 24 March 2007
HappySqurriel said:
The thing you fail to mention is that the PSP, PS2 and Wii all have (in a rough sense) very similar technical abilities and drastically outsell the XBox 360 and PS3 in both Software and Hardware. In other words, because of the Wii and PS2 it is possible to produce a game at 1/4 the cost that sells 2 to 4 times as many copies and (by your claim) it is their fault that the industry is struggling ...
Excuse me, where did I say that? Not the industry itself is struggling, the HD plattforms have to look for their role against/with the SD plattforms where Wii and PS-2 would have to be considered. I would not involve the DS and the PSP as handhelds are more or less a different market.
You can't really put their cost structures into the same category as the HD consoles. It is the same thing that happened in the Computer market several years ago. C64, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga all needed there own software. Multiplattform development was not so easy. The cost of the hardware was more significant than the cost of the software. One or two people were enough to write a program. They had to be specailists that knew more or less the internal tweaks of the system. In the console market this trend of necessary specialisation continued. Look at the development on the consoles. Multiplattform development meant you had several groups that wrote the software for one plattformn and they all got the same artwork, music and gameplay systems, but in fact they were different programs. Look at the development of the HD consoles: Most games are developped on middleware. This holds the development costs in check, but it also lowers the advantage of special hardware designs.
In the PC world this lead to the problem, that the processors had to cope with OutOfOrder execution, because they could no longer expect that the software was even compiled for this processor!
On the PS-3 and Xbox 360 you have the advantage that you can easily distribute the problem in two parts: One main processor that runs the general system and secondary tasks that are done by libraries. If these library calls will generate a dedicated program in one SPU or a process in one of the remaining cores does not matter. You have a more or less identical approach. Smaller teams can try to tweak the software a bit for each plattform but the main development stays the same! This significantly reduces the costs. The Wii does not fit as easily. It is not capable to handle the same middleware, so you have to write the software in a different way. Thats one of the big problems I have with the Wii as the winner of the next Generation. This is not the next Generation, instead it raises the question if people want a next generation! I wouldn't even be surprised if the winner of BluRay HD DVD battle woulöd be: the DVD!
The big problem is: people expect better graphics and more features but you can't really raise the price in the same manner. So you must program more features and make more detailed artwork for nearly the same price! It's simply a general trend. First you wrote the software in Assembler. This gave you the maximum power of the system. But the hardware got bigger. It was much easier and cheaper to write first in low level, then high level languages. In fact I am a software developer and we write our software for many different environments, with the help of some powerfull low level libraries that hide most of the hardware features from the developer. Sometimes you have toi tweak some things in the lower level libraries but in general it does not matter if the software runs on Windows, Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel), Linux or one of the Unix plattforms. You write the software one time. Only in specail cases you have to check on one plattform. A PC, a Xbox 360 or a PS-3 can handle much more problems in one second than a Wii, but someone has to write the code and you won't earn so much to add more developers (and if you have more developers in a project, this reduces the efficiency of one developer. They have to communicate with each other to really understand their job. They have more to do with their colleagues than with the software itself. It is really hard to tell someone that the work, he had done in the last two months won't matter anymore...).
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