Battlefield 3 doesn't look that good on PS360, the Wii U is no where near playing it on the settings the trailers (PC) you've seen are in. To put it simply, PS360 plays BF3 on low, Wii U could maybe get medium, High end PCs will get Ultra (low-med-high-ultra). So there is still a very long way to go, and I would want Orbis/Durango launch titles to at least be on par with BF3 on Ultra/Watch Dogs PC footage/Luminous demo

Well, it's your opinion vs mine. To me Battlefield 3 looks great even if it plays on low. If Nintendo combine that technology with their game design I'm confident that those games will look mindblowing.

Alright, I'd just rather not have jaggies, constant pop-in in places, sub-HD resolutions... I like my games looking sharp and clean most of all, 60FPS would be awesome as well, anything else that makes it look awesome like high-res textures is just a nice bonus. And it's not just graphics, player counts had to be severely dialed back on consoles (64 on PC, 24 on PS360), and if you want their destruction engine to progress, we need better hardware. 

Always the same shit,  this kind of stuff was already said about the first Ps ONe.  'Their will not be many devs embracing the idea of making games in 3D because it will be a huge risk that will cost many to go bankrupt'  only a few laters and the majority of the devs was only making their games in 3D'.. Every generation the same shit and sadly this generation it reached a new height....Please dig in the old threads I am sure you will find some threads about how their will be not many games for PS3/X360 because of the high cost and how everyone will end up making games for the Wii only >_>...

Lostplanet22

unless this time its true

One thing that has only been hinted at but not truly discussed herein Is that the consoles might be too powerful for consumers. If your TV can only display 1080 and the console has an upper limit of 1920, all that extra tech is wasted added cost.

Mike from Morgantown

PS -- Given the global economy, few will be upgrading their TV sets so soon.

Hard to say. If Sony and MS do not step up the game it is time to be a pc gamer. Still this is just as much speculation as the average prediction. 

Huh? Next gen games won't be going over 1080x1920, which is what most TVs are at now. Even if they were to support 2160p games definitely won't be running at that resolution, the next step for TVs is 1080p OLED glasses-less 3D, so consoles will be built with that in mind rather than resolutions higher than 1080p. 2160p may be needed for 1080p in 3D, but even then I'm sure devs will go for 720p when in 3D.

You've missed the point.

It's not that developers will only make games for the lower-power platform. It's that developers will feel they have to develop for the higher-power platform (if it's a significant jump), and it'll drive them out of business.

Don't think it's true? Look at all of the studio closures in the last 6 years. And it'll get worse as the number of units necessary to break even on "AAA" titles increases. And the result will be fourfold:

1. A lot of studios will end up going out of business as they try to deliver a title that sells well enough to make a reasonable profit given the expense of development.

2. Far fewer new IPs will be developed, as the risk of a game not being popular enough to at least come close to making a profit will mean that only the most successful publishers and developers will be able to take the risk.

3. The number of safe, low-cost titles (in other words, the sort of family-friendly titles that so many gamers mock) will skyrocket, as companies scramble to establish some sort of cash cow that will sustain them.

4. The big AAA titles will start to look more and more alike as developers become more risk-averse and stick more tightly to proven approaches.

Note that all of these have been in evidence in this generation, already. Lots of studio closures, a glut of sequels, too much focus on "teh casualz", as so many like to put it, and heaps of brown-and-grey FPSes, have been the biggest complaints about this generation. Now picture all four problems being amplified by a factor of 10.

Of course, the big risk if Sony and MS go for much more modest increases is that they'll end up with consoles not particularly more powerful than the Wii U. Why is this a big risk? Because if there isn't a significant reason (like a significant jump in graphical capability) to develop for the other systems first, the default will be to develop for the least powerful system, and port up. They do this because then they can be sure that the quality of the game on the "lowest" platform will be good enough. It was seen with the PS2, which was generally the primary development target even for games that were certainly multiplatform and even early in the generation. If you develop for a stronger platform first, you're forced to then do extra work to get it working on a weaker one, whereas developing for the weaker target first will result in the stronger version being relatively trivial.

This will work against Nintendo in the meantime, as 360/PS3/WiiU development will almost certainly use 360 as the primary development target, and the Wii U will only get alterations to make it use the Upad. Of course, this would be why Nintendo is so willing to fund third-party development of games that make innovative use of the Upad - it ensures differentiation, and titles targetted at Wii U will likely look better than those that are targetted at 360 and ported up.

It does put Sony and MS in a fine balancing act situation, though. Too powerful, and it'll play havoc with the industry. Not powerful enough, and it'll pretty much guarantee the Wii U dominating, short of some major innovation. And I don't doubt that this was precisely why Nintendo chose to release their system now (rather than either earlier or later), to make the financially best configuration sit just a moderate distance above the PS3 and 360, so that Sony and MS are stuck with that balancing act.

Developer mentality says our software runs better on higher spec hardware, potentially with a lot less optimization required depending on how comprehensive the SDK tools are and how well they facilitate the transition to the new hardware.

The latter half of that statement applies to ANY new hardware platform.

Developers will always take more memory over less. It makes their job easier and provides more flexibility by the simple merit of providing a larger pool of essential resources to draw from. This is an elementary enough statement that anyone should be able to see this.

Similarly, having more processing power both in GPU rendering capability and raw CPU processing capability removes more restrictions in addition to providing those new shader, lighting and rendering effects to make the visuals that much more believable. Use of the latter are not a requirement for next gen game development. Reduced budgets will always result in reduced visuals. This is apparent even among 7th gen hardware based games.

Lastly, as I know it's already been pointed out, take one look at PC game development to recognize the fallacy of believing the availability of better/higher spec hardware automatically equates to increased budgets for all games across the board.

That simply is not true.