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potato_hamster on 19 April 2016
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Pemalite said:

 

 

 

potato_hamster said:

Console video game development is not a matter of tweaking sliders. Engines are not designed to support this new specification. It's actually a whole pile of extra work, and literally double the QA cost when there is literally zero expectation for increased sales. None.

Video game developers get nothing out of supporting a higher-spec console except lower profits.

The game engines already support the hardware.
It is literally a matter of tweaking sliders as API's, drivers, OS everything else will remain the same.

If anything Multiplatforms will be closer to the PC now in regards to graphics as most PS4 games were only high-graphics compared to the PC's Ultra.


The game engine is optimized for a specific hardware configuration. it is optimized for bottlenecks specific to that hardware configuration. You just can't take the existing hardware engine and say "we'll just tweak this number and that number and this other number" and boom an engine just as optimized for PS4K and it was for PS4. As you've mentioned, different hardware configurations introduce different bottlenecks. These have to be accounted for, and solutions need to be developed. While you're right that it's less work than say optimizing an engine for the Nintendo NX, it's still a significant amount of work. People are going to spend months developing it, and engine revisions and improvements will take longer going forward. And again, there's literally doubling the amount of QA work needed. There's no two ways around that. The PS4K build will have to be tested as equally as the PS4 build is now. That's a fact.

This will make games more expensive to develop for PS4 going forward. Period. That means if developers have the option, they won''t support it, and if they don't they'll cut corners in other ways to keep the development costs the same. Budgets only increase if expected sales increase, and this specification bump gives no reason for developers to expect additional sales.