The primary reason I posted this was in the end, the hardware companies, regardless, could be doing far more developing their own middleware suites to lure 3rd parties in to make games better suited for their products. Imagine this: Nintendo makes the ultimate middleware suite. It's complete with every texture, every rendering product, voice activation sofware, Wiimote intergration, online compatability software, physics engines, ect, ect ect, all optimized for the Nintendo Wii. In all honesty, how much do you think between Steam, Havok, UE3, and the other major engines, the producers of these suites have spent on their solutions? I doubt that any one company has put over $30m into their suites. However, the hardware manufacturers, knowing even better than the devs do about their own machines, could easily plop $100m into their own "Nintendo Engine" or "Xbox Engine" or "Playstation Engine", and enable developers to drastically reduce costs by 50%, or more. This is expecially needed when the next-generation comes out (PS4, X720, Wii2, ect), as costs will still increase, even if Nintendo only used a system with a single-core 3.2ghz. However, each of the big companies could easily cut the next-gen fees, or even reduce them from previous generations via uber-middleware suites. So even from a financial standpoint, it'd make far more sence, because the primary advantage of making a game cheaper is merely by taking less time to develop the game, as 75% of your game-making costs are from actually paying the salary/hourly programmers, artists, coders, testers, ect to build the game. Therefore, if you could make..........A Final Fantasy-type game that sells 5,000,000 copies worldwide, but instead of making it in 3 years, you make it in 1 and 1/2. It sells the same. Not only did you cut your costs by 50%, incurring far more profit, but more importantly, you have a year and a half extra time with your developers to spend more time on other games. Even Epic themselves said that games cost too much, thus why they encourage middleware. If games started going back down to $1-10m for a strong title, the 3rd parties wouldn't have to port every game to every system, and we see the major companies trying to compete again in the marketplace of software incentives, and the games become cheaper. Remember, due to the price of developing games, as consumers, we still pay $50 to $70 for a game. Against inflation, we pay slightly less, but in most other market mediums (such as movies), prices have come down with top-rate DVDs being $20, and many being $15 at launch (VHS were $100 in the early 80s).
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
