Oh yes you do.  Back in the day they were complaining why they should make a PS One game while they could make one on the Gameboy that is a lot cheaper.  The PS One generation was more risky for the most devs because the most never had made a 3D game that opened a new world in video games.

So you see the problem too, Squilliam. Actually, nothing has changed at all in 20 years. The "haves" can survive no matter what; the "have-nots" are the birdmen, the Icarus in your metaphor, who can only survive when the conditions are right. Funnily enough, most of the developers who thrived on the NES (and Genesis and SNES) faded and vanished when the PS1 and PS2 took dominance.

The reason is simple enough: they adapted to a specific point in the industry cycle, and were entirely unprepared when the cycle shifted towards the other extreme. This is just the other face of the cycle: the developers who learned to thrive in the conditions set by the PS1 and PS2 era are failing due to the cycle being in the other phase now.

I've mostly answered that my reply to Max.

So I won't try and make too many conversation topics, but read and apreciated anyway.

So developers like Free Radical are average and me-too?  The guys that made Time Splitters?  Thing is there's a lot of great games that bomb in sales Okami and Viewtiful Joe being a couple, if those were made now and got so little sales the the development teams would be out of a job unless they were ran by a large company like EA, SEGA, Square, etc.  For the average development team the ones not owned by one of the big publishing companies, it's a horrible time as even if they make a great game it can kill their company, those developers are in between a rock and a hard place when developing many graphic and hardware intensive games this gen.

Your idea of survival of the fittest doesn't fly, especially when great games often don't get the huge sales, but between 100 to 500k which now could kill the whole company.

Also as far as Factor 5 goes, no official word on them, but if you've played Rouge Squadron there's nothing me-too or average about it, it looks great, it plays great, it's fun, lair was pushed and rushed to market, which has happened a lot this gen, so even good developers are being forced to take drastic measures, ones that are either hope the hype train carries them or die in the process...

The guys that made Timesplitters also made Haze one of the most dissapointing games this gen; So yes it is their own fault.

That was my point... and my point as well is in past gens excellent developers have been able to make a dud, take the loss and keep on going... Haze was Free Radicals dud yet they have to lay off a good bit of their work force and a huge hit in what they have to work with in future titles...

Successful people find success pretty much in anything they do, unsuccessful people tend to blame the environment or luck or some other intangible force for their failings. Its a similar situation here, theres a lot of money to be made but it seems the developers are all trying to make sports cars when the market demands the Camry. There are too many good releases on the HD consoles and too few on the Wii and other systems. The developers who aren't being successful with HD consoles need to sit back and think where their talents are best directed.

There are some MASSIVE holes in the Wii lineup,and you could drive the Titanic through them. The words, "Conventional game" and "Wii" don't seem to belong in their diction. HD development can be extremely profitable but only if you know how to navigate the bergs and find a safe way through.

Unfortunately the Publishers have taken the "Quantity over Quality" matra a little too far. They have a massive pool of mediocre developers and it follows with poor pay and conditions. They are not retaining their experienced staff so the real sickness in the industry is really in the mass produced sweatshop mentality of the Publishers who expect 100 hour weeks in crunch time. They cannot continue to get away with this mentality, they need to retain a smaller force of talented developers and the examples I put up earlier are examples of that. Those developers could make money on any system you told them to make games on. They are also extremely talented.

So I'm not even worth a cut-n-paste anymore?

@Maxwell, they got killed because they couldn't scale production up that quickly and it killed the quality of the game. They were also taking a risk when instead they should have started with Time Splitters, a safe I.P first. When you have 140 developers working on a project things get complicated very quickly and very few developers can make that kind of change off the bat and survive.

If you want, you can cut n paste yourself?