| mitsuhide said: So with that info in mind(Provided by HappySqurriel)how the hell do we keep dev costs down so we dont see devs go the way of SEGA and produce crappy game after crappy game? |
Cross posting from another thread, I'd say, not with this mindset:
| some poster said: It's good at taking a poor programmer's code and making it work. Microsoft has been doing this for a long time with their Visual Studio applications and even now .NET. Hell, a certain monkey like high ranking official even touted making the developer's lives easier in a recent conference. While it may sound great, it's bad for many... many more reasons than good. Developers don't even think about the processors anymore. Why is this bad? Because bad code doesn't show up in these situations. Coders that don't understand what the processor is doing and will blindly put in logic that make the processors perform many more tasks than are needed to perform a certain task. Ask your local developer what the fastest way is to multiply a number by 16. You'll get two answers. One is fast, and the other is lazy (or uneducated.) |
You have to have good dev tools. This has hit the general software business much sooner than it did console gaming, but hardware comes very cheap when compared to dev costs. This includes everything from designing hardware that's easy to program for, providing frameworks that aid development, good tools for artists, etc.
Sony apparently did almost everything wrong in this department. Apart from aiding Epic with the Unreal Engine, and maybe then geting a deal to license it at a discount, every decision they made caused an increase in development costs. Microsoft, on the other hand, put every effort to make crossplating with the PC easy. Yes, it suits them. But it also suits third parties, lowering relative dev costs. Nintendo chose continuity in development (both with the Wii and the DS), being disruptive only with the package - this also helps.
And yes, y'all can complain all you want about the Wii not being powerful enough. But truth is that riding ahead of the wave costs a lot for almost no benifit at all - you simply can't future proof anything in this industry, the wave rides to fast for that. Nintendo (and Microsoft too, though arguably less so) came up with what's technologically feasible now for a $200-$300 budget. Yeah, Nintendo was a little cheap with the hardware. But they didn't go from $300 to $600 as Sony did - that's just crazy. The Wii's not a step backwards, and if we were to be always half a generation behind the bleeding edge, I'd be more than happy with it. Remember that none of the most expensive and/or most powerful consoles ever won their generations, ever. And none of them matched the PCs of their time. This isn't exactly new.
