| MikeB said: Seeing a lot of childishness in this thread, so I will say something which may put some salt into open wounds.  The Wii is much MUCH closer specced to the PS2 than to the PS3. Yes, IMO this will hurt the platform eventually for lovers of Epic games. Yes the Wii is more like a cheap toy you give your kids for christmas.The Wii is easier to develop for to some extend (especially if you are familiar with the GameCube dev tools), but to push the system as far as Mario Galaxy does will cost developers more, lots of tweaking, finding ways around trade-offs and optimising, IMO devs can yield better and quicker results with fewer trade-offs on the 360 or PS3, especially if you use existing middleware like the Unreal engine. |
Developers have been saying for quite a while now that it cost 2 to 4 times as much to develop a similar PS3 or XBox 360 game as it does to produce a Wii game; this means that a PS3 or XBox 360 game needs 2 to 4 times the sales on the PS3 or XBox 360 to have a similar return on investment and justify the games development. The Unreal 3 engine does reduce the cost to develop PS3 or XBox 360 games but the Unreal 2 engine reduces the cost of producing a Wii game on the same level.
Now, I've seen these arguments from you (and people just like you) since the Nintendo DS was released in 2004; the argument that "eventually more people will care about graphics" or that third party developers will ignore the system because "it lacks the processing power to produce Next-Gen games" is flawed and we both know it. People play games because they have fun doing it, if they really want to look at pretty graphics they throw a DVD movie in; once graphics got to the level where anyone could really identify what was occuring onscreen without any imagination (approximately the Dreamcast) it became unimportant how much more powerful your system is.
