BengaBenga said:
yushire said:
Gamerace said:
This is an excellent discussion. Which we had ones of this quality more often.
In reading the replies I can't help but think of Miyamoto who says that you have to keep giving the consumer some new experience or they will get bored. Wii and DS were totally designed around this premise as were there main games: Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Music, Nintendogs, Brain Age. All are mega (10m+) sellers (except Wii Music but it's still a hit). Now Nintendo also releases new versions of classic franchises too (Mario, Zelda)
With western developers they have simply lost all innovation. And for good reason. The problem is the western's world pursuit of graphics and realism. This has driven costs sky high. With costs so high developers/publishers are scared to try new innovative game play ideas. They'd rather do sequel 10 or yet another FPS or realistic action game instead. That's okay except... everyone is now doing it. First off, the preception is the sequel needs to be bigger, badder and more graphically powerful than it's predecessor. But then it also has to out muscle your competition's game too. So there's little to no innovation and lots of rising costs.
THIS ISN'T A NEW PROBLEM. We had this same problem last generation for the exact same reason. Same games over and over with ever rising costs and ever dropping profits. These same companies were all losing money then too. Just not as much. The HD consoles are merely bring this to a head. Bringing PC games to consoles also made this problem worse.
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Now that I think about it, how many years before developers make a profit and HD console development becomes cheap? Its been 3 years already, so 3rd parties still cant handle the development cost of the 360?
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The single most expensive part in game devlopment (and in almost any business) is manpower. These high resolution textures, improved engines, AI programming etc need more manpower than the previous gen. That's something that's hard to cut back on. Sure middleware will decrease the development costs over this generation, but a character won't design itself.
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The primary thing that is eating so much man power is the production of graphical assets for HD games. It is something that can be cut back on, but developers would have to make it one of their primary focuses ...
Years ago I started to think that there were two reasons why Nintendo made so many "Mario" games, one was because consumers trust the quality of games that have Mario in them, but I also started to think that Nintendo did this in order to use the same models and textures from game to game. If you build a large enough library of these assets, 60% to 75% of all models and textures you need to produce a new game may already exist and you can focus your efforts on producing the content which is actually new.
There are side effects to this approach ... Your games have very limited capacity to look unique when you do this, and if you go for a "Realistic" look your games are (probably) going to look more and more generic as time goes on.
