Aielyn said:
You've missed the point. It's not that developers will only make games for the lower-power platform. It's that developers will feel they have to develop for the higher-power platform (if it's a significant jump), and it'll drive them out of business. Don't think it's true? Look at all of the studio closures in the last 6 years. And it'll get worse as the number of units necessary to break even on "AAA" titles increases. And the result will be fourfold: 1. A lot of studios will end up going out of business as they try to deliver a title that sells well enough to make a reasonable profit given the expense of development. 2. Far fewer new IPs will be developed, as the risk of a game not being popular enough to at least come close to making a profit will mean that only the most successful publishers and developers will be able to take the risk. 3. The number of safe, low-cost titles (in other words, the sort of family-friendly titles that so many gamers mock) will skyrocket, as companies scramble to establish some sort of cash cow that will sustain them. 4. The big AAA titles will start to look more and more alike as developers become more risk-averse and stick more tightly to proven approaches. Note that all of these have been in evidence in this generation, already. Lots of studio closures, a glut of sequels, too much focus on "teh casualz", as so many like to put it, and heaps of brown-and-grey FPSes, have been the biggest complaints about this generation. Now picture all four problems being amplified by a factor of 10. Of course, the big risk if Sony and MS go for much more modest increases is that they'll end up with consoles not particularly more powerful than the Wii U. Why is this a big risk? Because if there isn't a significant reason (like a significant jump in graphical capability) to develop for the other systems first, the default will be to develop for the least powerful system, and port up. They do this because then they can be sure that the quality of the game on the "lowest" platform will be good enough. It was seen with the PS2, which was generally the primary development target even for games that were certainly multiplatform and even early in the generation. If you develop for a stronger platform first, you're forced to then do extra work to get it working on a weaker one, whereas developing for the weaker target first will result in the stronger version being relatively trivial. This will work against Nintendo in the meantime, as 360/PS3/WiiU development will almost certainly use 360 as the primary development target, and the Wii U will only get alterations to make it use the Upad. Of course, this would be why Nintendo is so willing to fund third-party development of games that make innovative use of the Upad - it ensures differentiation, and titles targetted at Wii U will likely look better than those that are targetted at 360 and ported up. It does put Sony and MS in a fine balancing act situation, though. Too powerful, and it'll play havoc with the industry. Not powerful enough, and it'll pretty much guarantee the Wii U dominating, short of some major innovation. And I don't doubt that this was precisely why Nintendo chose to release their system now (rather than either earlier or later), to make the financially best configuration sit just a moderate distance above the PS3 and 360, so that Sony and MS are stuck with that balancing act. |
And again this is the same stuff we hear almost every generation...
At the start of the PS One/Saturn generation many devs believed they could only make profit if they take a huge risk. Guess what happaned? Many went bankrupt but also many got saved thanks to merging.. The PS one generation ended up with games that started to look the same (many platformers and JRPG's and kart racing ) and many sequels...(FF, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem, Gex, Resident Evil and many more).. To many casual and shovelware games.. also what you are talking about is an global problem and what you call in the USA 'Wallmart' syndrome? Big companie that has so much financial/size power that smaller companies/stores need to take risks to survive..While big ones will hardly invest in stuff that will give them a little more profit;..
But lucky smaller game companies have a chance in the game industry thanks to Xbla/PSN etc.. (Notch with his minecraft made even more money last quarter than MS/nintendo and Sony combined).
