Turkish said:
VanceIX said:
This generation has been particularly competitive between Sony and Microsoft, with both trying to undercut each other in terms of featurs vs. power and such, and prior to the revealings of the consoles near nothing was concrete in terms of specs. Now, most of the games on the consoles are either ports or first party games, which makes me think- could the reason be because the third party devs were left in the dark in terms of console hardware before release?
I think that both Sony and Microsoft themselves were uncertain about the final hardware specifications of their consoles until the last few months before release, which would lead to devs not having access to a solid development kit. I'm sure Sony wasn't positive about the unified DDR5 memory until the last year, as just two or three years ago the cost would have been too prohibitive to include 8gb of it. Also, the first generation kinect was released towardds the end of last generation, which could mean that Kinect 2.0 was only recently finished and finalized. Finally, AMD's unified APUs were introduced only in 2011, which means that the decision to use unified chips probably was a recent one, and truly graphically competent GPUs weren't even here until 2012-2013 (and, seeing as that the development cycle for most triple-A games is around 2-3 years, a year or at most two probably wouldn't be enough for developers to transition console development).
This leads me to believe that devs have had much less time to fiddle around with development kits compared to previous generations. Thoughts?
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Looking at your profile, you were only 10-11 years old during the start of last generation. I dont think you are able to say this generation is off to a slow start when you haven't experienced past launches like this, or bothered to look up PS360 sales in 2005-2007. If you're talking about support: The PS2 had more games than PS3 back in the first half of 2007. The PS3 had awful software droughts for all of 2007 and much of 2008. PS4 has a much bigger support already. It's the fastest start in history. Look up at the games list of the PS3 till April 2007. I think that most 3rd parties didnt expect this gen to start so fast, EA predicted 10m combined sales till by April, combined current gen sales are 12M right now. They really underestimated it and some wanted cross gen to last a little longer like the transition last gen. Thats why we're seeing ports from last gen announced left and right to get in on the next gen action so they have something out on the market while they keep us waiting for the truly real next gen games.
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My point exactly. In previous gens (and don't even say I'm not old enough, I'm an adult and I've been gaming since the PS1/N64 era, so I've been around for plenty of launches) the majority of the games released weren't ports from the previous generations. They were new games, developed exclusively for that generation. This gen has, up til now, been full of optimized remakes and ports, and while it is fast changing, I was just putting in a theory of why we don't see many original, next-gen games.
You're Gonna Carry That Weight.
