Last Remnant's delay: Unreal Engine to thank for?

[MikeB]

Bodhesatva said:

NJ5 said:

Seriously, everyone should give Microsoft some credit for making a console with a friendly architecture. Going by the declarations of many developers, if there's something that Microsoft brought to the console world it was greater ease of development, through friendlier architectures and better development tools which were previously only available for development on the PC.

It's also true that Microsoft moneyhats companies for exclusive games (like Sony does), but let's not pretend that's the whole story.

 

 

Absolutely agree with everything here.

At some point, people must give credit to Microsoft for making their system easy to program. We heard stories before the 360 was released of Microsoft furiously visiting third parties finding out how they wanted the system made; we now here stories constantly of how much easier the system is to develop for. Some people seem to want to insist that this isn't true, or that even if it is developers are lazy stupid heads if they rely on streamlined architecture. Come on guys -- Microsoft very consciously made their platform easy to develop for, and it has paid off. The end.

I also strongly agree that Microsoft moneyhats people, but not everything they've gotten in the last couple years is a result of that. Please remember that MS has a larger marketshare and sells more software (on average -- not this week!) than Sony does right now; in addition to the streamlined architecture, this explains why Microsoft seems to be getting breaks with third parties that Sony may not be getting right now.

 

 

They could have made the 360 more like a cutdown PC, like the original XBox was. An ordinary x86 CPU would have simplified things even more (but it wouldn't have been the right choice).

Microsoft has an OS monopoly on the PC, many developers use their tools to create games. It was already expected way before the 360 would be released they would concentrate on easier PC to 360 migration.

Personally I prefer companies to concentrate on the actual technology potential, if this involves needing to adapt to better and more efficient coding pratices and introducing some backwards compatibility issues I still prefer this.

Windows 1.-0 up to ME could have been made to be better products if the OS wouldn't have to take into account an easy MSDOS to Windows migration. But Microsoft's monopoly might comes from the legacy software library, so from a business point of view this made sense, far more so than from a technology point of view.