Dead Space iOs better tan Wii version?

[Mr Khan]

WereKitten said:

Mummelmann said:
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What I don't understand is how some of our oldest members, intelligent and eloquent ones at that, can fail to see this? 3rd parties are not acting out of some childish spite and don't have a hidden agenda to sabotage a console. Nintendo have a strained relationship with 3rd parties ever since the mid 80's and that is a widely known fact. Making a console that makes cross platform development practically impossible without massive modifications didn't help much either.

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As a developer, I would like to add another facet to this reasoning - something that I'm not sure is an actual concern in the game studios, but sounds likely to me.

We keep hearing how Wii development costs much less - mainly because of the reduced asset costs. But while an investor considers ROI, a studio might also consider the "Return over Intellectual investment".

Basically investing your time in learning to code for iOS devices and building frameworks and engines for it is apparently considered well spent by many. That has probably to do with the underlying platform being perceived  as offering chances for returns in the future: the iOS platform is almost as strictly defined as the Wii one but it will offer a continuous upgrade path in the future with the synchronous evolution of OS and hardware. Couple this with an even lower cost for assets than Wii development, and you get the attractiveness.

On the other end of the spectrum, you get the 360, the PS3 and the PC. And while the three have very different architectures in many regards, there are some intellectual capitals that are needed by all platforms and that will surely be spendable in the future as well.

For example, this was the generation of consoles that forced developers to really master multicore, multithreaded machines. It's no longer just the optimization of a set of shaders, but also offloading and balancing computation and i/o jobs like never before. The guys working on the Unreal engine explicitly declared that they learned a lot about multithread optimization by working on the 360 that they then backported to the PC engine. And I'm sure that when the guys at Naughty Dog or SCE Santa Monica developed some color space, anitaliasing or animation technique, they are thinking of how they will spend it or evolve it with even more threads or cores, and they would be able to do the same on the 360 or a PC mutatis mutandis.

The Wii might be in a position where a dev might be cautious to invest training/time/money in the tech because it's a perceived as a mid-term project with much less universal / long-term returns.

The obvious counter-argument here is that all the assets necessary for Wii development pre-existed on the GameCube. Investments that were made back at the turn of the millennium could continue to be used. Like my argument for Soul Calibur Broken Destiny: Project Soul had a perfectly good set of Soul Calibur II assets that they could have used and optimized for Wii to make a good-looking game in its own right, and fairly cheap. Many third parties could have taken advantage of this, but none seem to. Look at Hot Pursuit for Wii: looks worse than many NFS games on the fricking GameCube (or on the Wii itself for that matter). Where did these pre-existing assets vanish to when they decided to make a new Need For Speed?