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HokageTenshi said:
sc94597 said:

How does rendering the same game at 720p increase software development costs? Development costs increased in the PS360 generation and now this generation because of graphics in its totality, not rendering resolution, which literally takes up a few lines of code to change in most cases, if the engine doesn't already support varying resolutions. 

lower resolution makes the programming much easier and faster so that...

time and manpower for development is the cost for every game...

How does it make the programming easier and faster? If I programmed a game and ran it at 480p on one platform and 720p on another, the cost of development doesn't change. In fact, we see this on open-platforms like Android, and IOS all the time. The games run at the resolution native to your screen (in fact you need third party apps to make them run less if you want.)  In fact, in many cases a higher resolution might LOWER development costs, because you don't have to think of ways to make up for low image quality, such as say text-scaling or showing a feature in a game that would otherwise be obscured by the low image quality.  The only thing a higher resolution output would affect is what GPU you need to put into the console to run the visuals you want to run at said resolution. That is a hardware cost, not a software one. The reason why development costs increased is that games became more complex to produce and software technique had to be discovered. This has only so much to do with resolution in as much that resolution was a burden before and limited how complex games could be and now it is large enough that it isn't.