potato_hamster said:
vivster said:
Steambox was a failed project from the start because it never had any target audience.
What I am saying however is that you do not hear PC or mobile developers complain about having to develop for more than one single set of hardware. I mean those poor souls must be furious to do the impossible task of developing for an everchanging platform. And after all that hassle they don't even make any money because of the split audience on so many different devices.
Yeah no. All that complaining about different specs and having to develop for different hardware specs just makes them seem ridiculous. Just imagine if they already had to develop for 2 completely different platforms with completely different environments and platform owners. Oh wait, they already do...
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The steambox was a failure because it's actually the worst of both worlds and appeals to pretty much no one. However that also applies to PS4/X1 upgrades but you just haven't figured that out yet.
Hey, care to let me know if iPhone developers are required to support older models of iPhones? Right, they're not. They can develop specifically for the iPhone 6S if they wanted to and make the game incmopatible with previous platforms. Or they could develop a game just for the iPad Air, or just for the iPad pro if they choose. And do you know what they do if they don't test their game on a particular iPhone model and they just assume it works, but when the game hits it turns out it's unplayable? They just cross that model off of their compatibility list and move on. See what I'm getting at here? That's a bit of a different scenario then, isn't it? They can raise the minimum spec of their game to just support the hardware which already runs a game well rather than putting in the effort to optimize it. Imagine going into a gamestop and having to look up whether or not the latest PS4 game was compatible with your version of the PS4 before you bought it. I'm sure such a scenario would have would-be console buyers just throwing their money at Sony!
On top of that, iPhone games aren't known for their stellar graphics, or advanced AI, or being the leading edge of gaming in any way, are they? That's because iPhone games aren't optimized for specific hardware specifications, which is one of the biggest advantages of console development. This means that making iPhone games is actually more akin to making PC games than console games. This is actually the same argument as the "PC games support millions of different hardware specs, why can't console games?" argument, except scaled down slightly, but the same negatives to this style of development still apply.
So again, you not understanding why developers would complain is because you lack a fundamental understanding of how console video games are made. Sure they could develop console games the way PC and iPhone games are developed, but they'd be incredibly unoptimized compared to how they are now, and they would still be more expensive to develop for since the QA work would still be increased linearly for every additional specification, and QA is already a significant portion of console development. Console games would look worse, and run worse, and would be less complex than they are now. That is, unless you expect console video game developers to put in the additional efforts of rewriting engines, and eat all of the other additional costs of supporting a new hardware specifcation when there would quite literally be no expectation that any of that effort would lead to additional sales.
Why are people having such a hard time grasping that console video game developers actually stand to lose from supporting this concept?
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That logic might've been true for PS2 and earlier generations but not anymore. "Highly optimized and stable" games for consoles are a rarity now. There are so many broken, badly optimized and unfinished games on console these days that they can't use quality control as an excuse because there rarely is any quality anymore. Developers aparently don't give a shit about resolution or framerate anymore. They just build their vision, then realize that the platform is not strong enough for it and then they try to dig themselves out of their own hole by "optimizing". Which in most cases is barely possible because the game on such limited hardware has to be designed for performance and then visuals, not the other way around.
So what can we do to help struggling developers who aren't even able to optimize a game for a single platform? That's correct, give them more power to deal with. The games might still be unoptimized garbage but at least they'll run better.
