Sky Render said: You obviously did not read my point 2: that the return on investing in the incumbent market is getting increasingly small. Why would you NOT invest in an emerging and consumer-popular piece of hardware in light of ever-rising costs and ever-shrinking returns in the incumbent market?

Ever-shrinking? Hmm so software sales have fallen from 2007-2008 on the Xbox 360/PS3? No then its not shrinking.

The A teams still have a stronger incentive to primarily produce Wii software - Your Epic, Bungie, Insomniac, Gearbox, Valve, Infinity Ward et all developers.

Teams B through J aren't going to produce top quality software as reliably as the A teams. They are your typical Spiderman web of shadows type developers. The issues that prevent them from producing quality software on the Wii are most likely still present.

@HappySqurriel

The main issue which causes development problems on the Wii are going to be augmented if they approach Wii design with a more visual focus. The main issue with the Wii software at present which must be solved by third parties first is product testing, especially getting their software into the hands of a diverse userbase. Otherwise they are going to keep making the same grave errors with the interface or invent new ones. They need to have their products tested, and early which makes using a PS2 engine an excellent design decision to help them put their key interface and gameplay elements to the test early so changes can still be made.

If they use a more advanced graphics engine they push the date for first testing the software outward as they need to spend more time developing the engine. It also puts pressure on the games budget/release schedule which can take time/money away from the required testing process. You've seen games with obvious interface/gameplay flaws which you can see quite clearly and yet somehow they managed to release a game with such flaws still evident.

One thing which seperates many of your AAA developments from the run of the mill games is product testing. Valve/Left 4 Dead is the perfect example of how extensive produce testing inspired them to make a game which is infinitely replayable. The whole idea of product testing is even more important on the Wii because you're attempting to cater to a much wider demographic for whom tacit game knowledge may be partially or wholly absent from many of the users who may be playing games for the first time.

 

wow...that was alot of words.....

The fact of the matter is, even if the Wii is 2 xbox's plus two ps2's...I heard somewhere that the ps3 is 40 times more powerful then the ps2.....so that whole argument was kinda to make wii owners feel better about their, in some ways, inferior console

however, the wii is also superior then the ps360 in a lot of ways...but this was a discussion about horsepower...

@ HappySquirrel

That's not the case with regard to the Broadway chip. The PS3 Cell is also basically as for some other products, other than one SPE being disabled for the PS3. Of course a lot R&D went into the Cell, unlike for the Broadway chip, but it's in Sony's interest to see as much mass production of the PS3 Cell as possible (like used for servers and super computers, this to trigger production cost reductions).



64 KB L1 cache (32 KB instruction cache, 32 KB data cache) and 256 KB L2 cache.

Squilliam said: Sky Render said: Poor Squilliam, falling for the classic trap that kills more developers than anything else: the "keeping up with the Jonses" trap. Let me explain this in a fashion that will hopefully make sense: developers do not decide what direction technology advances, consumers do. If your product holds no value to consumers, consumers will not buy it, and thus will not fund your technological advances. The consumer, not the manufacturer, is king. And if the consumer wants games on the Wii, then that's where developers have to go if they want to survive in the long run. While it is still early in this disruption and the previous market iteration still holds some value, that market iteration has been under considerable strain. This is due, among other things, to exactly what Squilliam is touting: the rat-race-like attempts to keep up with and out-develop other developers with more and more expensive solutions to what amounts to a very simple problem: keeping people entertained. A market where development costs are perpetually on the rise cannot last forever. Eventually, the market breaks apart. You obviously didn't read #2 - Return on investment.

 

Wii games cost around half as much, even if they spend a lot, so the return for even high end games would be better. Just because some thick-headed developers think there isn't an audience doesn't mean the audience isn't there. No More Heroes would have cost a hell of a lot more on the HD systems, and wouldn't have made as much money even if it sold as well.

MikeB said: @ HappySquirrel One of the main reasons so many companies have been moving towards IBM for their embedded solutions is because IBM has designed their processors in a modular way so that they can be highly customized. That's not the case with regard to the Broadway chip. The PS3 Cell is also basically as for some other products, other than one SPE being disabled for the PS3. Of course a lot R&D went into the Cell, unlike for the Broadway chip, but it's in Sony's interest to see as much mass production of the PS3 Cell as possible (like used for servers and super computers, this to trigger production cost reductions). If Nintendo doubled the on chip cache on the Broadway processor 64 KB L1 cache (32 KB instruction cache, 32 KB data cache) and 256 KB L2 cache.

 

Although that was because that was a lot of cache in the 6th gen. The Xbox's CPU had just 128KB of L2 cache, and the Cell has 512KB all the processor's shared. The 360 has 1MB for all the cores.

LordTheNightKnight said: MikeB said: @ HappySquirrel One of the main reasons so many companies have been moving towards IBM for their embedded solutions is because IBM has designed their processors in a modular way so that they can be highly customized. That's not the case with regard to the Broadway chip. The PS3 Cell is also basically as for some other products, other than one SPE being disabled for the PS3. Of course a lot R&D went into the Cell, unlike for the Broadway chip, but it's in Sony's interest to see as much mass production of the PS3 Cell as possible (like used for servers and super computers, this to trigger production cost reductions). If Nintendo doubled the on chip cache on the Broadway processor 64 KB L1 cache (32 KB instruction cache, 32 KB data cache) and 256 KB L2 cache.   Although that was because that was a lot of cache in the 6th gen. The Xbox's CPU had just 128KB of L2 cache, and the Cell has 512KB all the processor's shared. The 360 has 1MB for all the cores.

The Cell does not work like that. The PPE has 32 KB L1 instruction cache, 32 KB L1 data cache and 512 KB L2 cache, each SPE has its own little cache and 256 KB SRAM, which is as fast as cache but isn't cache as it's far more flexible, it's dedicated system memory, each SPE is like a seperate system on a chip.

 

Squilliam said: Sky Render said: You obviously did not read my point 2: that the return on investing in the incumbent market is getting increasingly small. Why would you NOT invest in an emerging and consumer-popular piece of hardware in light of ever-rising costs and ever-shrinking returns in the incumbent market? Ever-shrinking? Hmm so software sales have fallen from 2007-2008 on the Xbox 360/PS3? No then its not shrinking. The A teams still have a stronger incentive to primarily produce Wii software - Your Epic, Bungie, Insomniac, Gearbox, Valve, Infinity Ward et all developers. Teams B through J aren't going to produce top quality software as reliably as the A teams. They are your typical Spiderman web of shadows type developers. The issues that prevent them from producing quality software on the Wii are most likely still present. @HappySqurriel The main issue which causes development problems on the Wii are going to be augmented if they approach Wii design with a more visual focus. The main issue with the Wii software at present which must be solved by third parties first is product testing, especially getting their software into the hands of a diverse userbase. Otherwise they are going to keep making the same grave errors with the interface or invent new ones. They need to have their products tested, and early which makes using a PS2 engine an excellent design decision to help them put their key interface and gameplay elements to the test early so changes can still be made. If they use a more advanced graphics engine they push the date for first testing the software outward as they need to spend more time developing the engine. It also puts pressure on the games budget/release schedule which can take time/money away from the required testing process. You've seen games with obvious interface/gameplay flaws which you can see quite clearly and yet somehow they managed to release a game with such flaws still evident. One thing which seperates many of your AAA developments from the run of the mill games is product testing. Valve/Left 4 Dead is the perfect example of how extensive produce testing inspired them to make a game which is infinitely replayable. The whole idea of product testing is even more important on the Wii because you're attempting to cater to a much wider demographic for whom tacit game knowledge may be partially or wholly absent from many of the users who may be playing games for the first time.

 

For quite a long time (in computer terms) game development has been focused around an iterative development methodology which (essentially) means that testing the game begins very soon after game development begins. The Wii is not new and unconventional technology that requires years of software development up front to develop the tools and technology to build games for it, and you should be able to start with existing technology and begin building gameplay dynamics while you're working on enhancing the graphics pipeline to take advantage of advanced graphical features.

The only reason we haven't seen more games that really push the Wii was third party publishers were caught with their pants down and didn't anticipate the success of the Wii. A large portion of Wii games so far have been rushed ports of PS2 games which tended to be developed by (no offence to the developers) third rate developers because most of the best developers had moved onto HD console games long before the Wii launched. There have been excellent Wii games from third party publishers, but many of these games were really low budget games even by Wii/PS2 standards (de Blob, Boom Blox, Zack and Wiki, No More Heroes).

There are many publishers who seem to be reversing this trend and focusing more of their effort on producing higher quality games for the Wii, and over time this should result in games which are more visually impressive. An example of a company that is doing this is Sega, and I suspect they see the lower-development costs and higher sales of the Wii as an opportunity to return to some of the more experimental game development that paid off for them in their glory days.

Will visually impressive games ever make up the majority of the Wii's line-up? Probably not because it makes sense to have as diversified of a line-up as possible; but the lower development costs on the Wii (1/4 to 1/2 the cost of a HD game to produce a similar Wii game) means that they can combine 1 big budget visually impressive Wii game, several smaller budget Wii games, and quite a few WiiWare games for the same cost as producing one game for the HD consoles.

fell asleep reading that article.

I wont enter too much into the technicisms ,but judging by results its clear the Wii isnt much more advanced that the Cube and Xbox.

Most of the better looking Wii games are GC games as RE4 and Zelda.Re4 had a PS2 version only slighty inferior to the Wii/Cube games.

Galaxy looks great ,but its not leagues ahead Mario Sunshine (look at side by side videos).Metroid 3 is just a little step beyond Metroid Echoes .

The Wii specs may be better that the Cube specs ,but you really need very significant leaps in power to see really different results .If you had the PS2 clocked at 400Mhz and with twice the RAM(16Mb) you would still see PS2-like games with a little more draw distance,some negligible detail more,some frames more of animation on 2-3 NPCs more on screen.. but pretty much the same limitations and same feel.Go to open worlds ,hundreds of NPCs on screen ,higher resolutions ,online managing etc and that kind of increase is irrelevant.

More so ,the investment in developing tools for that kind of hardware stopped long ago...Wii is quite maximized right now due to it being a known architecture ,anyone expecting big jumps in its games is fooling himself.

As for The Conduit ,I dont think it looks too well.Given the offerings the Wii is getting it sure looks better than most Wii games but I dont see it as drastically above HL2 or Doom on the Xbox or Black on the PS2 and Xbox .

Millennium said: Chrizum said: There is indeed a major war going on in the gaming industry. It is not a console war so much as it is a war for balancing out resources between Casual and Core type games. In this war, the Core gamer does not seek the eradication of the casual. The Casual gamer is needed. This is where I think the article is mistaken. The so-called "core gamer" DOES seek the eradication of the casual: to push everyone but them away from gaming again just as they did ten years ago. There is no true threat to the core, not even if casuals are catered to, but the core imagine a threat that people who Aren't Like Them will get into gaming, and this scares them to death, because for all that Nintendo was inflammatory when they described the core demographic as "anti-social teens," one thing they weren't is incorrect. The industry and its core demographic is ailing, and the cure is an infusion of new blood and the resulting socialization of the core.

The industry was growing year after year without need of the Wii and its "social gamers".

I dont think core gamers want to erradicate casual gamers.I can live with things like Wii Sports,Singstar and Buzz being around.But what the core gamer doesnt want to see is the focus of gaming to change to casual offerings and the bread and butter of the software developers to invest their money and energy into the so called casual gaming that is many times little else that cheap shovelware.Seeing things like the Training games or Nintendogs always at the top and many developers trying to jump on that bandwagon is seen with some fear by core gamers ,and with some reason.If casual games proved to be far more profitable that expensive core games the amount of cash and time spent on the later could be greatly reduced .Its simple economics,and thats what the core gamer fears .Luckily it isnt happening due to the high selling power of the traditional industry and the concrete purchasing trends of the casual gamers(they buy all the same and once they have their lot they are happy with it and dont buy much if anything more in years) .