| joora said: IMHO it would be great for the developers, since production costs won't go skyhigh, so there will be potential for innovation and not just "playing it safe". Since the establishment of Steam, I find myself enjoying indie games better than many "gaming blockbusters". The mainstream genres just feel stale and lack some radical innovation. |
This would be only great for Nintendo as it would mean that they would get equal support from 3rd parties. The way I see it Nintendo have shot themselves in the foot by releasing a console which while using a relatively modern architecture is comparable to the 360/PS3 in performance.
What that means is that once Microsoft and Sony release significantly more powerful consoles the 3rd party developers will design multi platform engines that run on modern PC's as well as PS4/720. As far as rising costs go that's more a natural result of inflation and not more modern hardware. The fact that this time around the consoles will be less exotic in design, in particular Sony's console will mean that it will be significantly easier and hence cheaper to port games from PC and vice versa.
@OP
Your premise is highly unlikely to happen as both Microsoft and Sony will want to distance themselves from Nintendo and they have a great oppurtunity to do so. As they are not only going to be releasing likely more expensive consoles but also releasing them at least a year after the Wii U which means they will get more performance per dollar spent.
To be honest if they were to release consoles in the power range of the Wii U then it makes no sense to release consoles at all and they should just milk their current ones. Of course technology is advancing and we have modern engines like Unreal engine 4 and others that will require more robust consoles.
Also note that many current gen console games already have superb assets which have been downscaled in order to get acceptable frame rates that make the games playable. Even at the start of the PS4/720 era you will see this reflected in their games let alone later on when in house engines start to mature over the next couple of years.
