| Soundwave said:
I'd agree it would be a problem, but lets be honest -- just about every Western developer does this today anyway with PC game releases. What's more work for a developer -- having to hire a completely new dev team to make an inferior version of Call of Duty (for example) from scratch for Wii versus the PS3/360/PC versions ... or being able to use the higher end assets that you've already designed and have sitting there and then just having a couple of guys work in addition to the main team to downscale assets for the "base console"? It's better than the alternative of not getting games like BioShock and Mass Effect and GTAIV and FFXIII and RE5 (whatever their future 720/PS4 equivalents are anyway) at all, or getting them but only getting the "butchered" versions. |
You're making the assumption that developers would need to make two versions of the same game ...
Take most PC games today and examine the hardware that is needed to run the game at its second highest level of detail at a resolution of 720p@30fps and compare it to the hardware needed to run the game at its highest level of detail at a resolution of 1080p@60fps. While the average user could hardly tell the difference between the two from the look of the game, the price difference and energy requirements associated with the two systems are substantial. With Crysis 2 the difference is a Radeon HD 5770 (a 2 year old budget gaming graphics card) for the low performance and a Radeon HD 7870 (a new high end graphics card) for the high end performance.
