Dodece said:
You are forgetting about the large install base that currently exists. If fifty million 360s have hard drives that can accomodate that install that means with a software adoption rate of ten percent. The game could very well sell five million copies on the console. Obviously that is a strong profit motive, but it isn't one that has existed for much of the consoles life span. If the developer needed fifty million potential customers to justify the development costs. Then when the console solf fifty million units it still wasn't enough, because maybe only thirty five million of those owners could run a mandatory install of that size. It is no way ideal for a platform to have to wait many years to become truly viable for any game genre.
I also must say that Square is something of an odd duck when it comes to design choices. The reason most of the high end games in the genre demand that the player installs the game to the hard drive. Has everything to do with maximizing the playability of the title. Mandatory installs greatly enhance the performance of the hardware, because optical drives are so much slower then reading data directly from the hard drive. That is another issue with the console not coming with a hard drive. It will decrease the platforms relevancy, and decrease its performance potential.
A great many PS3/360 owners install their games to increase the performance. It allows for better visuals, higher framerates, less pop up, and less time spent in loading screens. The last is very important as far as this particular game is concerned, because lets face it this was the biggest gripe with reviewers. That the game spent far too much time in loading screens. I have to agree with their sentiment. Anything longer then half a minute seems to be too long for most of your average gamers.
I wouldn't use Square as any kind of example. They are not exactly unknown for their ass backwards approach to game design. After all this is the company that opted to build a game engine in house for their Final Fantasy series. Obviously a big investment that most developers opt out of instead choosing to license a game engine from anther company. Which had absolutely no technical advantages to justify its creation. Basically they spent a lot of money building something that they could have bought off the shelf for much less. It ended up costing them a whole lot more money to do, but worse it ended up delaying their games. It might in the end even result in them needing to redevelop some games for the upcoming platforms.
The company basically copped to not using best industry practices as part of their development process. It was both financially wasteful, but it was making them less competitive in the marketplace. Moving forward Square has publicly stated that they intend to use a more common, and thus a much more wieldy design process. Dragon Quest is probably one of the last games they will make under that old philosophy. Anyway the title is hardly apt as far as this conversation is concerned, because it is a painfully simplistic game. It just isn't all that dynamic a world they created. Basically they get away with it by not really taxing the system in any meaningful way.
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Square's sub par business practices was not what we were discussing, even though Final Fantasy seems to be the problem of their financial issues, not Dragon Quest. You stated that MMO's won't be on WIIU because of the HDD issue, yet here is Dragon Quest X. Besides MMO's aren't even really an issue seeing as how very few are even successful, much less a successful MMO on a console.
Also I find it hard to believe that the customers who want things to work right out of the box are the same ones who are installing the games to make them run faster, those customers probably don't know how to use the system past put in the disc and play.
Also why would companies make 4 player local multiplayer games knowing that most of the userbase wont have 4 controllers, or like all consoles PS1,PS2,N64,GC that use memory cards, while tecnically you can still play the game, name me any companies that made a game that didn't utilize memory cards cause they didn't come packed with the system, because I can't think of any.
Like I said before, it could be an issue, but where we disagree is the scale of the issue. Only time will tell if it was a huge mistake or not. Personally I think it wasnt because Nintendo is trying to make an affordable system while still trying to make a profit, and trying to have a tecnological pissing contest with Microsoft and Sony would probably be suicide. Nintendo just needs to release HDD's with their stamp on it so people know its compatible with the WiiU, and they could always upgrade newer consoles with bigger HDD's as the console parts get cheaper.
Nintendo has been having issues with 3rd parties for generations, and I don't think that making a powerhouse console will just bring them back in to the fold, GameCube was a perfectly capable system, and yet got almost no 3rd party support, so I understand Nintendo's weariness to just go balls out to please 3rd parties.
Off Topic but Personally I think that Square making it's own engine being a mistake and is bankrupting the company, if true, is another reason that development costs are just skyrocketing out of control. If you have to license an engine just to not go bankrupt, then maybe we need to change the direction games are going.
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