OXMUK

It's not quite that simple, Xbox hardware chief Boyd Multerer told us at the console's reveal event. "Yes, in the sense that the Application Programming Interface surface area on the next Xbox is extremely similar to the API surface on PC. So your code isn't going to have to go through a lot of change. But, I don't think that's where most of the work is.

"Most of the work is in tuning the artwork that you're going to put in to your game, and you know - video cards in PCs are going to be vastly more powerful than any of the consoles that are coming out," he continued. "So there's just fundamentally different requirements in terms of what artwork needs to get built."

This echoes Multerer's account of how games development has evolved this decade past, which you'll find in our comprehensive Xbox One reveal guide. According to he, the bulk of today's 100 million dollar triple-A budgets are reserved for art, rather than coding, as demand for more detailed, high resolution visuals necessitates the construction of evermore intricate characters, objects and environments. This is particularly the case when developing for the maximum settings on a high-end PC, of course.

"When you're building for the console, you're going to spin up the art team and you're going to have them focus on just this particular set of art," Multerer continued. "You're going to have to redo a whole bunch of things, you're going to have to tune, tune, tune. Now, if you're talking about smaller games - if you're talking about more casual games, yeah, it's going to be way easier to port to the new Xbox, because you don't have the same kind of art problem.

"If you're talking about the giant triple-A games - yeah, you're going to spin your art team up, and that's where most of the time and the money is going to go. The code will be relatively easy, but that isn't your problem anyway."

Xbox One ships with 8GB of RAM and a swanky eight-core CPU, but Microsoft's Alfred Penello has suggested that the published specs "might not tell the whole story on performance". This could be a reference to the console's cloud computing support, which allows it to offload non-latency-dependent tasks to servers, freeing up resources on the Xbox One itself. Alas, streaming art assets would be enormously impractical.

http://www.oxm.co.uk/58919/will-it-be-easier-to-port-from-pc-to-xbox-one-yes-and-no-says-microsoft/

So "Ultra-high" PC versions are responsible for development costs more than consoles? Hm.

not really the fact that you have to retool you art for each platform more than the code drives the price up.....

it's like making a big wedding cake and then having to do the same in miniature.... the raw material is not the issue... reworking the piece to fit a smaller table might be the time/money consuming part....

This guy has it backwards. Actually, it's more about tuning DOWN for the PC. Adding lower graphics settings, supporting cards and hardware/OS combinations that lack certain features, testing on all that to make sure it's still playable. Optimising UP will be rare, because the market is so small as to not be worth it. 

Because most people still have really bad graphics cards.

The most successful game companies are those that allow play on weak computers - Valve, Blizzard, Riot, EA (Sims/Simcity)

But most of companies not like Valve,Blizzard,Riot(come on,don't count EA just because few games)

Some of them not enough skill,but most of them is because lazy