Michael-5 said:
Games are also in general selling better then they used to. Before the PS2 era it was unheard of to see a 3rd party game break 10 million units sold, now games like CoD sell 20 million annually. Also the jump to next gen isn't that big, it's a 9x jump where the jump between 6th and 7th gen was 25x, and before that, even larger. Next gen games are still largely based on the same engines current gen games are based on, so there is a lot more recycling with code. |
True. 6th gen total games sales for home consoles were between 1.6B and 2B, while 7th gen already sold more than 2.2B and it hasn't stopped yet. Agree also about 7th to 8th gen performance jump, not to mention that now that Sony too adopted a more conventional architecture, average dev cost will stay more under control, and MS and Sony adopting fundamentally a PC architecture, with Ninty sticking to an evolution of Wii architecture will help in that direction. Finally, a large amount of RAM will help too, 7th gen had really too little, it wasn't anymore matter of optimizing its use, but, in games with large levels and with many items in them, having to devise suboptimal dynamic loading strategies to make up for its lack, and dev costs grew beyond strictly necessary due to this.
