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MDMAlliance on 07 July 2014
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episteme said:
MDMAlliance said:
episteme said:

And you don't need AAA budgets to push graphical boundaries on PC.


What exactly qualifies as a AAA budget?  And I would imagine you would need quite the budget to push the boundaries on PC.  Making video games are not cheap, and if you make games that only work on higher end PC tech, the budget will be even more strict as the base of users that would buy the game is considerably lower than the number of PC gamers.

This is the reason why I don't believe console gaming is holding back PC graphics as much as people think it is.

I don't know, the OP thought that you need expensive AAA games to push graphics.

The needed budget gets lower when you don't have to worry about hardware limitations.

Maybe it's a too extreme example (and it's not pushing boundaries, lol), but "The Light" was made by one guy with the Unity Engine.

http://abload.de/img/svet2013-04-1818-59-5pzaa3.png

http://abload.de/img/svet2013-04-1818-59-0h9x3t.png


You don't NEED expensive AAA games to push graphics, depending on how much that actually implies.  Money often gets poured into a variety of other things besides resources for graphics, but they still have a lot of resources used up for making great looking games.  

Also the needed budget doesn't necessarily get lower when you don't worry about hardware limitations.  The budget would most likely stay the same, or fluctuate depending on how much they think they could sell and what their profit margins are expected to be.  It's really all about the market and hardware limitations will still exist given that if you want to aim for the largest installed base, you have to use the statistics for what kinds of specs most users have.