Topic: Kojima is unsure of ps3

[ThePerm]

http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/mag.dyn/News/9390.html

says ps3 is going to be a bitch to make games for and that revolution will be mad easy...

[Famicom]

He's just fishing for a moneyhat. In a week this comment won't exist.

[darknight06]

I'm willing to put $2,000 on that statement.

[TheYoungerPlumber]

Every time I read something like that, I think "Nintendo is offering the use of a free general purpose game engine for exclusives."  That would totally get developers, large and small, to make games.  I mean, lower dev costs = less risk.  Of course, then I think that Nintendo will hide secrets (a la N64 microcode) to give their games an advantage.  Then again, if Nintendo truely believes graphical tech prowess will be a non-issue this generation, they would have no reason to do this.  Graphics will largely be determined by the detail/quality of art, not code.

[ThePerm]

its hilarious to see the difference between 3rd party games on n64 and 1rst party lol

[Ian Sane]

Kojima says the PS3 will be hard to work with yet one of the first games announced is MGS4.  People said the PS2 was a b!tch to work with and that the Cube was incredibly developer friendly.  Yet that made no difference.  The PS2 was where the money was so that's where the third parties went.  I'm sure Factor 5 and Capcom had a blast with the developer friendly Cube but no one else really did.  Now Nintendo making a more developer friendly Revolution is a good idea.  Obviously it's better to have a console that's easy to make games for than one that's hard.  But they have to do more than that to attract third party support.  The opinion of developers doesn't mean sh!t.  If you want third party support you need a PUBLISHER friendly console.  Publisher's decide what console gets support.  The developer's opinion certainly didn't mean squat when the Capcom shareholders decided that Resident Evil 4 would be ported to the PS2 and that the port would be announced before the Cube version was released.

The PS3 is a VERY publisher friendly console.  It's got the strong Playstation brand name and it's designed specifically for mass-market generic blockbusters with pretty graphics and licenced music.  It's the type of console where one can follow a simple formula and crank out a hit.  It's an EA kind of system.

The Rev, assuming Nintendo isn't full of it, will be the kind of console that inspires creativity and is designed specifically for a gaming artist.  That's going to be great for Nintendo themselves and devs are going to be interested in it but the board isn't going to care.  They're going to look at the books, notice how poorly third party games sold on the Cube, and that's going to be it.  There is one thing Nintendo will have that publishers will like and that's the low cost.  But they have to be careful of what they sacrifice for the low cost.  If the the hardware is too weak the publishers can't get the graphics they want.  Weak graphics with great gameplay doesn't sell or at least that's what publishers think.

The Rev looks like it will attract indie developers more than anything else unless the hardware is up to snuff and somehow Nintendo offers something on par with the competition for a lower price.  Ideally I think Nintendo should go for the second party strategy now more than they ever have.  They'll get devs interested but not publishers.  So logically they themselves have to publish these games.  If they do that they can attract some support.

[Mario]

Watch Kojima call making games for PS3 an exciting "challenge". I've got a feeling we might be seeing lots of "multiplatform" games next generation, from games like MGS that traditionally don't go multiplatform, Kojima has even hinted at this. Metal Gear Solid 4 is on PS3, but that doesn't mean it can't be on Nintendo Revolution too. If not, then i'm sure we'll see other HIDEO KOJIMA games from KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS by HIDEO KOJIMA (he likes his name) on Nintendo Revolution.

[KDR_11k]

Kojima once said the PS2 is a bitch to program for and they like the challenge. He expects the PS3 to be even harder to work with and they're going to LOVE it.

Maybe then came the realization that he's a game designer, not a coder and therefore has no clue about the difficulties of working with a platform, maybe one of the coders smacked some sense into him.

[Galford]

Kojima can speak whatever he likes.  Konami execs have the final say where MGS4 goes.  Remember all the nice things that Kojima said about the GC when MGS:TT came out?  Did it produce more games for the GC...

Nope...  

[TheYoungerPlumber]

Quote
People said the PS2 was a b!tch to work with and that the Cube was incredibly developer friendly.

Yes and no.  The GC is an easier system to work on than the PS2 if you have to fend for yourself.  The real issue with the GameCube was third party relations: from what I've heard, Nintendo does not like to share tricks-of-the-trade to make code run better on the GC.  It's as though they save that information so they can reward developers/publishers for exclusives or consistent third party support.  Sounds a bit like the N64, eh?  The PS2 is a bitch to program, but Sony goes out of its way to give developers tips, which solved problems after a few years.

Will Nintendo work more with third parties to make their games look and run better on the Revolution?  Nintendo likes to have superior-looking exclusive titles, though, and it HATES diverting resources when it doesn't see a direct profit from doing so... I'm not sure we'll see Nintendo going out of its way to make dev-friendly tools like Microsoft did on the Xbox, but that would be a good start.  Ninendo clearly wants the hardware to be straightforward, and hopefully it does not think that alone is enough to be called developer-friendly.

[Talon]

Lets not forget that Nintendo is a software developer more so than a hardware developer.  So would you want to give away all your little tricks of the trade to your competitors? Hell no, you want to make sure your games have the edge. Now this in itself is a paradox for Nintendo. On one hand im sure they would love to have as many 3rd parties on board to sell their hardware, but on the other hand they would probably want less so they can sell more of their software.

[jasonditz]

Plus, while ease of programmability might not matter too much in terms of third party support, its very important in terms of getting the most out of the hardware.

The PS2's ridiculous initial specs were never even close to seen in any of the games that were released.

Meanwhile the Cube, for all the initial complaints of its being underpowered, was a much easier platform to code for, and that made it easier to push its limits in games like RE4.

[Ian Sane]

"from what I've heard, Nintendo does not like to share tricks-of-the-trade to make code run better on the GC. It's as though they save that information so they can reward developers/publishers for exclusives or consistent third party support. Sounds a bit like the N64, eh?"

That explains a whole lot and it isn't surprising at all.  If Nintendo continues with that strategy they're not going to improve things at all with the Rev.

"Lets not forget that Nintendo is a software developer more so than a hardware developer. So would you want to give away all your little tricks of the trade to your competitors?"

That's the problem with Nintendo.  Third parties are NOT competitors.  They're partners.  Nintendo makes money from every game sold for their console.  The better third party support Nintendo has the more money they make.  Plus it would increase market share thus meaning there would be more potential buyers for Nintendo first party games.  On the N64 almost every first party game sold at least a million copies in North America.  Very few Cube titles have sold over a million even worldwide.  And guess what?  The N64 had a larger userbase and more market share.  Funny how that works.  I remember hearing that Goldeneye sold like 7 million copies or something and Nintendo published that game.  It would be impossible for ANY game to sell that many copies with the Cube's userbase.  It's just too small.

Think how many copies the GTA games sold on the Playstation.  Now imagine getting some money for every one of those sales.  That's what Nintendo misses out on with their idiotic third party policies.

[jasonditz]

I actually heard some similar stories about Nintendo's iffy documentation of the Cube. If true its a mistake.

They definately make a lot more money off of a first party sale than they make off of a third party sale. Selling 5 million copies of GTA Cube would probably not net them as much money as selling 1 million copies of Mario Sunshine.

Its just silly though if they're intentionally sabotaging the third parties (which I doubt). They don't need to, they're got the best development teams on the planet.  

[Ian Sane]

"Selling 5 million copies of GTA Cube would probably not net them as much money as selling 1 million copies of Mario Sunshine."

But selling 5 million copies of GTA AND 1 million copies of Mario Sunshine would make them even more money.  I think Nintendo has this idea that if they let third parties do better it's going to eat into their first party sales.  They must have a pretty low opinion of their own software because last time I checked they make better games than anyone.  If anyone's going to be "stealing" sales it will be them.  Plus it's not like on the SNES Donkey Kong Country sales were hurt by Mortal Kombat II's.  The only time I can think of where one game's sales hurt another's is when like 50 good games are released in November but that's an easy situation to avoid.

And Nintendo has to compete with third parties anyway.  Because of their poor third party support they're in last place and as a result a lot of people own a Cube and another console.  That means Halo and GTA are competing with Metroid Prime for the multiconsole gamer's dollar.  Nintendo can either compete against third party games on their own console where that they make money from or they can compete with third party games on another console and watch Sony or MS benefit from any "stolen" sales.

[jasonditz]

I agree, they definately need to do a better job of bringing third parties on board. I don't know how much truth there is to it, but I've heard more than once that they give better documentation to certain favored third parties, and I think that's a mistake if true.

I've seen a copy of the N64 development docs that they sent to smaller companies. They're a joke! You can literally  get a better handle on the hardware from reading homebrew developer sites. That's something that's got to change (and maybe its already somewhat on the Cube). They need to make their third party development program more like Apple's. The ADC documentation that comes with Xcode is actually very impressive... a tad verbose, but I'd rather have 2,000 pages of well written descriptions of the platform that takes weeks to digest as opposed to a 60-page paper that's slapped together and that requires months to do anything with.

[KDR_11k]

Nintendo is paranoid, they think a company's size is proportional to its ability to keep trade secrets secret. They think giving full docs to a smaller dev would just result in someone leaking their SDK on the net. At least that's what they say pretty openly on their "apply for an SDK" page.

[Galford]

I suppose there a little truth about developer docs leaking.  If look around the Net long enough you can find official PDFs from Sega about the Saturn.

The PSX is so well documented that Sony lost a lawsuit to Connectix() when they claimed that their emulator was based on freely available docs on the Internet.  Of course a big part of this was due to Sony's own fault..

Did I just defend Nintendo is this post???