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Soundwave on 06 April 2012
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Viper1 said:
Soundwave said:
Viper1 said:

The problem now is that your still have to release the game with 2 sets of game assets.   1 that can designed to work with the GPU upgrade and 1 lower quality set of assets that is designed to run on the base console.    Or you can take the risky route by requiring the GPU upgrade and leaving out the base console market entirely.

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 *existing* 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.

I think developers would appreciate this approach actually.

I think you are forgetting about capacity of the medium.

Some PS3 games already approach the entire 50 GB capacity of a dual layer Blu-ray disc.    You are suggesting they find a way to put those assets and the higher quality assets all one disc?   Going the 2 disc route just upped the cost.  Releasing 2 seperate SKu's is even more expensive.


You do realize PC games have different levels of assets stored on one disc that run on 5, 6, 7, 8 different hardware configs (let alone just 2) right? That doesn't make a game double the size.

None of this is anything particularily new. Devs deal with this stuff every day, lol.

The alternative -- not getting games like Mass Effect, BioShock, RE5, etc. etc. etc. isn't any better. At least this is a way for Wii U users to get the same games as everyone else and for Nintendo to still be able to turn a nice profit off their hardware and not have to sell the base console for a price that's outrageous (which would alienate the casual/soccer mom/kids group, which I'm guessing is a complete non-starter for Nintendo).

I think it's fair for Nintendo to say "well if you're a hardcore player and you really want these obscene specs so you can play these higher end games that start to come out as this generation wears on, we still want your business, but you're going to have to subsidize the cost of this extra hardware piece which we can sell you for cost". That sounds like a fair deal and reasonable compromise to me.