| Sevengen said: a few people in here have posted that MS and Sony can't release consoles that much more powerful than the Wii-U for fear that they'll lose third party cross platform titles. That's complete nonsense. The only thing that's going to limit the technical abilities of the PS4 and Xbox(insert # here) is cost. Both companies have a massive, entrenched fanbase and could care less how powerful the Wii U is going to be. If they're able to squeeze in 20 times the performance of Nintendo's next offering and do so in a cost effective way, then that's exactly what they're going to do. Besides, that argument is completely contradicted by the Wii's success this generation. Developers ALWAYS want more power and more room to create what they envision. If both of those machines are significantly more capable than the Wii U, developers and gamers both will gravitate towards them. Developers for what they can achieve and gamers for what they can experience. I think Nintendo and the Wii U are actually in a bad position. MS still has plenty of room, time, and opportunity to keep the 360 relevant for another year 1/2-two years. I don't see them launching anything by next christmas. |
I don't think anyone has said that ... In fact, I think I'm probably the one you're thinking of and my point was the opposite of that.
For decades games that have been released on the PC have targeted a range of systems that have very different capabilities, and there are some very well understood approaches to dealing with this problem. Most game engines have very sophisticated level of detail systems that are designed to ensure that system resources are available to be allocated to visual elements that users will notice. By tweeking the LOD threshold values you can dramatically reduce the complexity of a sceen and, as a result, enable two systems with very different capabilities play the same game at the same resolution/framerate. When you start adding resoultion and framerate (and features like 3D) into the equation, the processing power difference required to make it impossible to release a game across both platforms becomes very substantial.
To put a number to this difference, we will say that a system will need to be 8 times as powerful as the low end system to prevent cross platform game development. Now, based on the components that are rumored to be in the Wii U we can say that it (likely) is at least 4 times as powerful as the HD consoles and it is entirely possible (after customizations) that it is 8 times as powerful as either system. When we combine both estimates the successors to the HD consoles would have to be at least 32 times as powerful as the HD consoles to lock the Wii U out of cross platform game development. While we may be approaching a time where that is possible, it certainly won't be cheap ($500+ systems) and will require a massive jump in game development costs to take advantage of the processing power ...
Or to simplify and summarize my point ... Microsoft and Sony will have to balance the benefit of increased processing power against the negative of higher costs and, while I have no doubts both systems will be more powerful than the Wii U, I don't expect either manufacturer will be willing to accept the costs required to make a system as much more powerful as the Wii U as their fans seem to predict.
