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dahuman on 31 May 2009
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Deneidez said:
aderoche said:

As a game developer I want a platform that is easy to program for. Multithreading, full network supprt (coop and versus) and a fully programable graphichs pipeline are already complex enough without added artifical barriers to create a progression in game quality throughout a consoles lifespan. I want to spend my time and energy creating cool new features, not wrestling with the hardware.

As a game player I also don't like it, as if deprecates the consoles current library as launch games will look worse and worse conparitvly each year. Throw in the fact that gameplay innovation is becomming more important and you have no real win for difficult hardware.

I can understand that the cutting edge enthusiast will be dissapointed in that there is no yearly progression. These are the PC gamers who by a new graphics card every year. With the cost of devolopment already exceding revenue made from games this is and increasingly unttenable position.

The core point of the article seems to be that easy to program for hardware has made developers lazy and stiffles innovation. This I oviously dissagree with and find very arrogant and condescending.

As a dev too I have been wondering why they say that if you can't program blindfold, both of your legs behind your head, upsidedown and only using only your secondary hand you are lazy and you are good for nothing but selling sausages(Yes thats what they said about Gabe Newell.). I guess that makes me lazy too. I would like to however play around with PS3, but I wouldn't want to make anything bigger for it.

As a player I would say that games are currently only about hype and graphics with very linear and simple content. Pretty much opposite to golden era of PC gaming when content in games did evolve too not devolve like its doing right now.

Cost of development is even lower on PC than its on X360. You really don't have to optimize everything and you have much more space to work with. The myth about PC developing being hard because of variety of different hardware is just plain wrong. Today you really have to care just about how powerful those machines are you are developing game for. Anything else is handled by libraries that are defined by APIs.

I would rather have even more easier development than they have on X360. That could be achieved by using PC hardware on consoles. I predict that Sony would be in deep trouble with PS4, if they would use somehow tweaked CELL on it. In next gen cost of development would be higher and hardware with CELL in it would make even higher. Well, there has been speculations about CELL + Larrabee in next PS4, but I would see that as a suicide. Ditching graphical APIs would be way too much for some 'lazy' developers.

and it'd make dev cost go even higher too lol, what real lazy is=early Wii days, doesn't apply much to HD console devs for the most part.