Switch is where the Industry should be by now

[sc94597]

pokoko said:

sc94597 said:

This ignores the economics of video game development. A game is more than pure visual fidelity maximization. There are other parts of the game that need to be funded and resolved. Since publishers and developers don't have infinite resources, there must be trade-offs, and sometimes the trade-offs mean that the game won't push the boundaries in terms of asset quality, but might in others ways. The argument being made is that publishers have grown complacent and know that if they release the same game with better assets it will still sell quite a bit, while the developers who want to create something new suffer in a market where the standard is always for the maximization of asset quality. 

The frustration is not so different with that found in the movie industry, currently. Many moviegoers complain that the superhero and other action films with simplistic and complacent stories get tons of resources, while more thoughtful story-heavy films that might not have the best assets get the shaft. 

That's really just a lot of supposition.  If we stop at the Switch instead of the PS4, there would basically be no difference except with the visuals for high-end games.  It wouldn't suddenly lead to more innovation and it wouldn't have much of an effect on the budgets of most projects.  

Last gen, developers ran into the limits of the PS3/360 very quickly.  What was the gain in innovation?  Why would stopping at the Switch now, which is stronger than both, be different?

If anything, developers said that the limits, especially in terms of memory, held them back from doing what they wanted with level design.

It has much less to do with the hardware itself, and much more to do with the unrealistic demands of the consumers fueled by misguided publishers. There is nothing wrong with having powerful systems which push the boundaries. The problem is when gamers demand that every platform AND every game must cater to the top and cutting edge in visual fidelity at the expense of other aspects of the game and other boundaries. The Switch is good for the industry because it is a platform friendly to a variety of publishers and developers regardless of their ability to leverage capital or mitigate risk, just as dedicated handhelds and PC have that role. 

As for limitations to level design, AI, physics, this seems to be a marginal excuse. I haven't seen anything spectacular this generation in these areas, with possibly the exception of the way physics is handled. In the future this might be different, but all of these things are cpu-bound, and I don't see hardware manufacturers buffing up the CPU's in the systems (the PS4/XBO have low-end AMD Jaguar chips.)