id Boss: 3rd-Party Wii Development "Not Really Justified"

[LordTheNightKnight]

WereKitten said:

LordTheNightKnight said:

 

And Gears 1 was also hyped and marketed.

That's not the point. Ports could always be done. What is new is that you can develop multiplatform products using shared tools right from the get-go. It saves a great amount of time and money. Plus you can directly share many of the assets.

Less money spent to develop for a bigger market implies less risk.

That isn't actually true. Similar tools come from system similarities, not spec similarities. That's just a fallacy to assume similar specs save cost on their own. It's because of the Direct X system that 360 and Windows development is easier, not specs.

And that doesn't change the fact that HD development is still really high, and they can still take a while to develop, like GTA IV and RE 5 (and the latter doesn't even have the excuse of throwing out three builds before the final version).

You do understand that the PS3 doesn't use DirectX(1), and thus that multiplatform engines have to abstract out the library calls?

And that it's only because the consoles have grown powerful enough that you can develop in such abstractions spending much less time and money optimizing for the peculiar hardware, where with older consoles you would have had to separately optimize AI, graphics, I/O to the last bit if you wanted an acceptable performance.(2)

 

 

1. Duh! That's why I didn't mention it.

2. That does not save that much, nor does it mean doing what you can on the Wii would raise the cost too much to risk it (which seems to be an implication here).