| bdbdbd said: @Groucho: The visuals on HD consoles take a lot of time and money to make. Basically you could say that the more horsepower your game is using, the more expensive your game is. Now that you mentioned XBLA and PSN, we really should compare them to WiiWare, which is Nintendos equivalent. And is cheaper to develope... |
What's your reasoning behind this belief? I have seen a number of reports that state the "average Wii game" is cheaper than the "average X360/PS3 game", but that's very misleading -- I hope you understand the dichotomy of the two interpretations of that kind of statement.
In what magical way is the Wii "easier" to develop quality titles for?
Is it easier to program 1 Broadway processor, rather than 1 processor of the Xenon or the PS3's PPU? No -- they all have fine C++ compilers and development environments, and all three development kits have decent APIs and libraries. Is it "easier" to write to the all the way down to the hardware on the Broadway, to squeeze every ounce of available power out of it, than it is to write parallel engine code that runs on 3 Xenon PowerPC cores, or 2 HW PPU threads and 6 SPUs? No, actually.
Is it "easier" to have a new artist slap together models that look decent in 3DS Max/Maya/etc. with a lot of polys, and good textures, or is it easier to hire some spendy technical art pros, who understand how triangle stripping works, and efficient model building, to do it with just a few polys and lesser textures?
Is it easier to design a high-production-value game that has a huge number of limitations, because the hardware it runs on has only 64MB of memory, or easier to write a high-production-value game that can use 256MB, do you suppose?
Wii games cost less, because they are less. Wii games that cost more (and I would not doubt for a second that games like SMG, MP3, Zelda, etc. cost in the tens of millions to make, given that SM64 cost $30M) are more. If 3rd parties spent more on the Wii, we'd have more SMGs and MP3s and Zeldas. There's no magic here.
One of the biggest gripes reviewers have with Wii games is that they "look like PS2 games". Well, guess what, back when budgets were PS2-sized, ALL games looked like PS2 games. You get what you pay for.
