| SolidSnitch said: They can make a bit of improvement on the graphics without spending more money on the games, just look at GTA4 and Falout3 on the PC, much better graphics, still the same game so why not on a newer console ? I think the next gen will be on par with the PC or a little less at the time it release and the next Wii will probably be slightly more powerful than the 360. |
Well, development costs generally increase very rapidly and then plateau for a little while before they start increasing again ... The reason for this is that the the time it takes to produce (basically) the same content at "one level of detal higher" is very similar because the ammount of time it takes to add detail is roughly balanced out by the ammount of time save from trying to tweek an asset to look good; and the rapid increases come because you hit a threshold and the ammount of content needed for a game increases exponentially ... for example, taking a game like MySims and boosting the texture and model detail to match the capabilities of the XBox 360 would not (dramatically) increase the development costs over what it took to produce the same game for the Wii; but when you add in the additional texture work to look like a high end XBox 360 game (Normal Maps and what not) and the additional objects to make the environment look better the workload explodes.
Being that the workload to create an asset or environment for a high-end PS3 or XBox 360 game is not dramatically lower than producing an asset or environment for a pre-rendered movie, I don't think that we're going to cross a new barrier and see dramatically higher development costs in the next generation. What this means is that there is little reason for anyone (including Nintendo) to produce a system that is slightly more powerful than a current generation system, because whatever they do lower development budgets would have to come from a conscience decision from developers.
With that said, people look at the Wii only being somewhat more powerful as the XBox and conclude that similar hardware in 2012 would only be slightly more powerful than the XBox 360 ... This is not really the case being that the Wii launched 5 years after the XBox while the next Nintendo system will launch 7 years after the XBox 360, there was only a 2 manufacturing process difference between the XBox (180nm) and the Wii (90nm) and there will potentially be a 4 manufacturing process difference between the XBox 360 (90nm) and the next Wii (22nm), and Nintendo had every reason to keep the Wii as inexpensive as possible in this generation while they may be much more risk tollerant in the next generation ... Finally, if Nintendo's next system is powerful enough for cross platform development the sales of the Wii will ensure that (pretty much) every third party game will be made for the Wii 2 and ported to other systems.
