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Soundwave on 06 April 2012
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HappySqurriel said:
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.

I'm actually banking on that exact concept (scalability) for many games.

But I'm assuming by about 2014/2015 you're going to start to see games that make Crysis 2 even on high PC settings look like dog poop. Because really Crysis 2 is a game designed for the PS3/360 spec, it doesn't take full advantage of the PC cards its running on, and most PC devs are not going to do that until the PS4/720 are out.

Simply put -- it just costs too much money to justify making a PC-only game with say Samaritan level visuals right now ... but when the 720/PS4 enter the fray, that likely changes. Now you have three revenue streams for every version of every game. Most PC games right now are basically souped up PS3/360 engines, when Sony/MS move on to the next gen, you are going to see a pretty sizable jump eventually I think.