| Tispower said: I was thinking in more in terms of broadband, as I only know a couple of people who still have dial-up, and they don't play any online, all the people I know who do play online have broadband. I am frankly suprised people still mention dial-up (perhaps it's different in the States). Ok, I guess there probably is a fair amount of programming, but my point is (probably phrased it wrong there), it's not going to add several months and millions of pounds to turn an offline co-op into an online one, as the data is already there. So it shouldn't be a major issue to the developers, and therefore, it is pretty shocking if a game doesn't have it. I.e. some of the reviews of R:FOM criticised it because it had no online co-op, but as it had deathmatches, and it was an early game (where there were less people with a PS3, and therefore less online players) it didn't really hurt it. I seriously think that within 2 years, if a game doesn't have some for of online (most likely deathmatches or co-op campaign) then it will be highly criticised and lose sales. Perhaps now at the start of the generation where the majority of people (it's gonna take a long time before the total sales of the three 3rd gen systems add up to the 150mil+ sold last year) still have last-gen consoles, and therefore the online community is going to be small, but when say the three consoles total over 40million, then it will probably become a major thing. |
I'm guessing you haven't programmed, or if you have, you've never written network code. Network code is one thing I absolutely hate writing and that doesn't include any additional intelligent code to handle lag, cheating, or anything else that can occur over a network. While I doubt it would take millions of pounds to add network code to a game, I can tell you now, that it would definitely add a few months of time due to testing/development cycles.
Of course, with a lot of games these days built on 3rd party engines (eg Unreal Engine 3, etc..) a lot of this is already taken care for the devs, so when they lack it there, you are more than welcome to complain :P.
Edit: On a side note, I don't actually know what tools are given in the SDK, so perhaps writing network code for a console is simplified compared to other platforms.
