| torok said: Actually, you are wrong here. PS4 and One dev costs are the same as Wii U. When they transitioned to HD, things got more expensive. But the assets that studios create are already in massive high resolutions and the models are in the count of millions of polygons. No console or PC can use these assets at real time (an example, Uncharted 3 original assets would have hundreds of GB). So you just create high quality assets and downgrade them to real time. What they do with Wii U is just downgrade it more. |
Sure, as far as multi-platforms go, that is true, downgrading assets isn't too much of a problem, and to that extent closer peformance to other consoles requires less console-specific work in that area. But as far as exclusives, something like Mario is just not using the same detail assets as typical games on the other consoles, the entire art style goes against that level of detail and the entailed cost.
| torok said: About dev, Wii U would actually be more expensive, since PS4, One and PC share a similar architecture. You do a game for them and them have to rethink a lot of things for Wii U. An example is if you use GPGPU (a given with the newer consoles weaker CPU, the focus is on the GPU). Wii U uses a older shader model, so you have to rewrite your code basically from scratch. And you have the devs complaining about Wii U's SDK quality and the CPU. Sony and MS simply went with better development toolkits and machines with a better architecture and that drives costs down. Try to drive costs down by holding inovation isn't the solutions. Better SDKs and more direct architectures are the answer. I've read at some week about the game The Crew. The PS4 version was ported from the PC (since the game was in development long before the dev kits arrived). They ported it in 2 months with 5 guys. That's how you improve costs, with more tech, not with less. |
This is spot on, and again emphasizes Nintendo's weakness re: multiplatforms... Both on a theoretical power basis and architecture basis they are just so different from the other consoles that trying to shoe-horn crossplatforms into their platform requires a large amount of work to just have a worse experience. The best porting can only have slightly less worse experience, because the console just can't handle it.
