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

[WereKitten]

LordTheNightKnight said:

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).

1) then you're not addressing my initial point, that was that for the first time the PS3 amd 360 are powerful enough to be considered a single platform together with the PC

2) does not save that much?

You can develop a game for the 360, spending, say, 18M dollars.

Add 20% of that and for 21.6M you have a 360/PS3 game. Your target market has just doubled.

Assume 15 dollars of revenue per copy and you break even at 1.44M sold between the two consoles.

Enters the Wii from stage left.

You have to rewrite most of the code, downsample the textures, modify the geometries, maybe change some AI or number of enemies of set up pieces to accomodate the single cor, less powerful CPU. You must find a way to integrate Wii controls. You end up spending 5M on that (the same as the minimum investment for a PS2 game)

This new investment makes money if more than 500K Wii owners will buy the game.

Now seriously, by looking at past sales, if I am a third party developer and my game has no licensed character and a mature appeal, which bet would you take:

- sell 1.44M+ between PS3 and 360 for profit

- same as above, plus risk 5M more and spend more time in development, sell 500K+ on the Wii for increased profit

I am pretty sure that selling 770K on 360/PS3 is a lesser risk than selling 500K on Wii for most genres that have limited appeal on the "extended" audience.