S.T.A.G.E. said:
Some of the best western made WRPG's made during the sixth generation. CD Projekt Red ports over Witcher 2 to the Xbox. You're telling me WRPG's aren't dominating? Come on. The Japanese couldn't even compete with the level of gaming. It threw the japanese off so badly they had no leg to stand on. In 2008 Hideo Kojima had to feel pretty bad that the console realm had instantly risen to prominence over the Japanese market. No one know why? Its easy..MS opened the floodgates for the PC devs to make a mass exodus to consoles with largely published titles. Bungie? PC company. Infinity Ward and COD? Originally PC games and MS got exclusivity when the Xbox 360 came for COD2. Can you explain to me how the FPS genre took over the console realm? PC was left out in the cold until Steam rose to prominence. When Nintendo ran the gaming realm PC gamers looked down upon console gaming and laughed. When Sony and Microsoft joined, there was no longer anything to laugh about. Sony threatened the market and Microsoft signed off on creating the Xbox to stop them from threatening their dominance in the multimedia and PC market. http://www.ps3trophies.org/news/news-8989-Ex-Microsoft--Enforcer--Says-Xbox-Was-Created-to--Stop-Sony-.html Microsoft came and who did they bring with them in the early 2000's? PC gaming. I wont even get into the influx of the indies. |
I'm sorry, but your original premise is wrong.
Of the studios that developed games for the original Xbox launch, only two were solely DOS/Windows developers before then.
Bungie was an Apple developer. The majority of the launch title developers had both PC and console development history, one studio had their first game on the Xbox console. While the majority of developers for the original Xbox were western developers, four were not. Tecmo/Team Ninja, and Sega being the two most prominante Japanese developers that released launch games on the Xbox.
The most successful company to release FPS games on the Xbox, besides Microsoft, was Ubisoft and the Tom Clancey series of games. Ubisoft's development history goes back to the Famicon/Super Nintendo, and include a number of different platforms as well as consoles. Epic released it's Unreal games on the Xbox, but those actually came after the PS2 and Dreamcast versions were released.
The investment necessary to make the transition to multi-core, parrallel, and modern GPU development wasn't made by most Japanese developers. While most Western developers were building 3D rendering and physics engines, Japanese developers were still largely locked in 2D gaming with scrollers, and platform games. Western games made the transition to consoles long before the Xbox.
Rare showed an FPS could work on the console. What was missing from FPS games on the console wasn't the control scheme, but the means to play against someone. With the original Xbox and Xbox LIVE FPS gaming began to climb, and it was Ubisoft that rode that wave.
The only Western developer that Microsoft had to drag, kicking and screaming to the Xbox platform was EA. In order to get EA to release an Xbox LIVE enabled game, Microsoft had to sell off it's sports games IPs.
If two Western PC only developers are your evidence for Microsoft bringing PC developers to the console, it's a really weak argument. The evidence, which a few minutes on Wikipedia will demonstrate, is that the companies that developed games for the Xbox were largely developers that had crossed over to consoles long-before the Xbox was released.
Had the PS3 not included the Cell processor, had it ended up being a more powerful PS2, far more game developers would have made the transition the Gen7 consoles. The problem was the investment to develop on the PS3 was far greater than most developers could afford, but fanbase for Japanese games was on the PS3, and while the PS3 sold well in Japan, in NA it didn't do as well. With a smaller fanbase, development split between two consoles, and the development costs excessive for one over the other, it wasn't profitable.
I don't think you quite grasp how significant of a paradigm shift happened in 2005/2006. Prior to 2005/2006, game developers pushed the hardware on the PC. They were constantly well ahead of the technological curve of hardware. That's why you see software-based solutions to graphical processing problems prior to 2006. The introduction of multi-core processors was the first change, which no game developer took advantage of until the Xbox 360. PC developers were happy to get a core all to themselves that they could use and let the OS play in the other core. A tri-core processor, with six hardware threads, all for a game was a big deal. That was just multi-core symmetrical processing. The PS3's Cell processor threw and even more extravagant wrench into the works, parrallel processing/programming. Multi-core symmetrical processing/programming is still far easier than programming for a parrallel processor. The concept was so foreign to developers that some of the initial PS3 games only utilized the PowerPC core, none of the SPUs. Programming for parrallel processing involves a lot of code and memory management, as well as performance and timing tweaking. It was a huge hurdle. Kudos to Naughty Dog for all of the investment they made in it, but the fact that so many successful western developers struggled with it, there was no hope for small studios that didn't have large cash reserves or Sony to back them while they learned.
The final challenge were the dynamic performance gains achieved in GPU. Where as in the past developers were pushing the capabilities of the GPUs almost as soon as they were released, the GPUs that came in the latter part of the decade were far more capable than what most developers could easily push. Crytek is the only developer I know of in the past 7 years to push the hardware technology that was available to it, and that was early on with Crysis.
Had the PS3 been easier to program for, I think things would have faired better for Japanese developers.