Rumor: Marvelous porting Wii game to PS3/360

[Procrastinato]

Joelcool7 said:

Procrastinato said:

Sherlock99 said:

Joelcool7 said:

Well I think its a pretty stupid decision. Even if the games are underperforming on the Wii, the cost of upgrading them to PS3 graphics will cost a mini fortune. Your talking 6-8 million USD to port the title or titles. Then you'd have to be really sure its the hardwares fault and not just a lack of interest in your software. Because to be honest its better to just break even with the Wii then to go in the hole trying to make a title a success on 360 let alone being suicidal and porting to PS3.

I can almost gaurantee if the title isn't a success on the Wii it won't be much if any better off on PS3. Maybe on 360 they'll see equal success to the Wii. But I highly doubt they will see a flop game turn into a golden egg!

I totally agree with everything you just said

I completely disagree.  I sincerely doubt they will do anything but use higher grade source textures (basically the textures won't mip out as much), and the 2D stuff in games like Muramasa probably started out higher rez to begin with.  6-8 million... lol.  If it costs them that much, sign me up as an artist at the studio they do it at.

Its probably a cheap move, or they wouldn't do it, obviously.  They're smart businessmen, not college dropouts.  If it truly cost that much extra, they wouldn't do it -- believing that games companies, or any major companies, are run by business fools is... self-descriptive, if you get my meaning.  You'd have to have a mighty high opinion of yourself to believe otherwise.

Companies die by making poor R&D decisions regarding unknown futures, by bad economic conditions, and by brutal competition.  They don't go under because the business types can't do basic math.

I agree in part. But making a game for Sony's cell proccessor doesn't have everything to do with graphics. It is really difficult to develope something for PS3. Even porting a 2D game to PS3 would cost over a million at least if not 3-4 million. I'm betting they are only refering to Microsoft when talking about porting. In which case they could probubly port it for a mill or two.

500k is way to cheap to port a title to even 360 as a low budget 360 title costs 4-6 mill to make according to EAGames Canada. Now I know 2D games are low budget but less then a million dollars is just irrational even to port to a single platform like 360.

My bet is to port to 360 it would cost them about 2 mill maybe a little less, to port to PS3 at least 4 mill do to the cell proccessor.

 

Sorry bud, the Cell has nothing to do with it.  The PPU of the Cell is easily capable of handling anything the Wii's CPU can do, all by itself, and in that regard, the Cell is just a plain ole CPU.

Porting this game would consist of (a) buying a PS3 devkit, (b) getting the PS3 C compiler running, and a project built for it, from your Wii project, and ( c ) compiling it.  You also will have to port the fixed pipeline graphics code you used on the Wii over, to some rudimentary RSX shaders you could probably download for free off the WWW.  As far as art goes, you probably just have to ask your artists "hey, where's the source art for Muramasa again?"  Then you run it through your toolchain and make sure you don't chop the resolution as much.  Voila.  PS3 Muramasa (or whatever).

Not hard.  Certainly not expensive.  500K, unless the devs were really, really dumb.

The expensive bit of HDs comes in when you want to start adding all sorts of other textures to your stuff -- normal maps, bumpmaps, other wierd stuff.  I sincerely doubt these ports will involve some sort of crazy graphics overhaul.  That would kinda defeat the purpose of the styles of hand-drawn art typically present in these games, wouldn't it?