Booyah said:
It didn't stop Dragon Quest X from being on Wii and WiiU.(MMO) Also defiance having a 10gb install and yet its still on 360, which means they are willing to make a game that forsakes some of the userbase, I don't see why the same conclusion can be drawn to the WiiU. As far as ammunition goes for not deveoping on Nintendo consoles, 3rd parties will always have some reason to not develop, and hard drive space seems like a small issue compared to some of the other reasons they don't want to make games on WiiU. I agree that putting a smaller HDD is an issue, but I think we disagree on the scale, I think it's a minor issue because they can always add larger HDDs later on in the lifecycle and so far and you can buy your own HDD if you like, the only thing Nintendo should do like I said is brand some Nintendo HDDs and sell them at retailers. |
You are forgetting about the large install base that currently exists. If fifty million 360s have hard drives that can accomodate that install that means with a software adoption rate of ten percent. The game could very well sell five million copies on the console. Obviously that is a strong profit motive, but it isn't one that has existed for much of the consoles life span. If the developer needed fifty million potential customers to justify the development costs. Then when the console solf fifty million units it still wasn't enough, because maybe only thirty five million of those owners could run a mandatory install of that size. It is no way ideal for a platform to have to wait many years to become truly viable for any game genre.
I also must say that Square is something of an odd duck when it comes to design choices. The reason most of the high end games in the genre demand that the player installs the game to the hard drive. Has everything to do with maximizing the playability of the title. Mandatory installs greatly enhance the performance of the hardware, because optical drives are so much slower then reading data directly from the hard drive. That is another issue with the console not coming with a hard drive. It will decrease the platforms relevancy, and decrease its performance potential.
A great many PS3/360 owners install their games to increase the performance. It allows for better visuals, higher framerates, less pop up, and less time spent in loading screens. The last is very important as far as this particular game is concerned, because lets face it this was the biggest gripe with reviewers. That the game spent far too much time in loading screens. I have to agree with their sentiment. Anything longer then half a minute seems to be too long for most of your average gamers.
I wouldn't use Square as any kind of example. They are not exactly unknown for their ass backwards approach to game design. After all this is the company that opted to build a game engine in house for their Final Fantasy series. Obviously a big investment that most developers opt out of instead choosing to license a game engine from anther company. Which had absolutely no technical advantages to justify its creation. Basically they spent a lot of money building something that they could have bought off the shelf for much less. It ended up costing them a whole lot more money to do, but worse it ended up delaying their games. It might in the end even result in them needing to redevelop some games for the upcoming platforms.
The company basically copped to not using best industry practices as part of their development process. It was both financially wasteful, but it was making them less competitive in the marketplace. Moving forward Square has publicly stated that they intend to use a more common, and thus a much more wieldy design process. Dragon Quest is probably one of the last games they will make under that old philosophy. Anyway the title is hardly apt as far as this conversation is concerned, because it is a painfully simplistic game. It just isn't all that dynamic a world they created. Basically they get away with it by not really taxing the system in any meaningful way.
