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Forums - Gaming Discussion - When will gaming costs stop the growth of hardware power?

GamechaserBE on 27 June 2015

More power= more easy, better presentation.  Like for example Dead Rising on Wii or x360. If they made the game for any of those systems they probably spend the same around time but presentation and how the game felt was big. People did not complain those graphics are not (atleast that wasn't the biggest thing to complain) but going into a garage where their are 30 zombies on Wii or 500 on X360 is huge and doing that cost hardly extra work.



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Mummelmann on 27 June 2015

In the 7th generation when Sony and MS pulled out of the industry and there was a huge crash. Wait a minute!



haxxiy on 27 June 2015

This train will only stop at its final hardware die shrink some 10-15 years from now. Streaming will take care of the few cases which aren't solved by these mighty 5nm computers, like massive multiplayer experiences a la Eve Online.



 

 

 

 

 

midrange on 27 June 2015

There is no such thing as enough power. Power does not always relate to graphics. Resolution may be harder to improve in the future, but there will still be cpu demand for better AI, larger worlds, fast particle effects, etc. Likewise, hardware can also be built to aiding developers. As someone pointed out, there will never be enough power, but there will be a "good enough." The ps4 and Xbox one is where the good enough point is, the wii u would have been good enough at 2010, but it is most certainly not good enough now



Turkish on 27 June 2015
Darwinianevolution said:

With all those NX threads going around this site, I saw a pattern on many comentaries. They think the NX has to have more power than the PS4 if it wants to compete with both this gen and next gen. And that made me think of one thing. With developing costs growing faster than consoles and PC's userbases, we might reach a moment when there's no point on making more powerful hardware (at least, not in a long time) because very few developers are going to spend the cash recquired to use all that power properly. Imagine if games need three times more power to work and they cost three times more to produce, but the userbase has grown only 50% more. How many games would still be finantially succesful?

Just look at PS360. Those consoles have been around for a very long time and they're still kicking. I'm sure they will survive more years than the PS4X-Bone. Their power and developement costs are now very efficient, and with a 160m userbase between the two, most games on them now could be finantially succesful. When will we reach a point when that equilibrium is broken? And what will happen if we ever reach it?


A LOOOONG TIME

Basically you wont have to worry about that stuff for at least a decade.

The average costs of a AAA title are basically the same as last gen. I've heard of an increase of around 20%. It kind of reached a plateau last gen with some titles costing more than 100 million. Rise of Tomb Raider for example, that game is probably gonna be cheaper than TR2013 considering assets reuse, better engine optimizations, easier hardware to use etc.

Game development is becoming very streamlined with engines like UE4, Unity etc.