KDR_11k, I say the things that I do because I think that the market is going to change dramatically in the times that lie ahead.
I don´t care! if Sony can still attract developers who assume they will be able to make big sales on games that are hard to develope. That will not continue for long!! With the cost of developement going up all the time, fewer and fewer developers will want to take the risk of investing millions of dollars they may never see a healthy profit from. I see this proved in the many bankruptcies that have already taken place, mergers and what not. I also just read about some developers at Konami who are making games exclusively for Sony PS3, who are stating secretly that they may jump to other platforms because they are tired of how hard it is to develope for the Playstation 2/3 platform! Developers are also human you know, and it isn´t all about money, but also about them avoiding being burned out alltogether for the reasons of iron hard developement cycles!
I think that Nintendo is being 100% right about their way of approaching games and how they brand the super graphics in them unnesscesarry. Gameplay is the most important of it all, as merely looking on cool graphics and limited fun isn´t going to do the job of selling millions of copies to consumers. I have seen Ridge Racer on the PSP, and I am impressed over the graphics there but not over the gameplay. I have seen it all before, and have tired of it! It would last me a week, and then I would get rid of it never wanting to play it again. So it is with nearly all of the PSP games out now. And you can play nearly all of those same games bigger and better on a TV! Which is probably why it isn´t the huge success Sony thought it would become! People have seen it all before.
I read about people who say that the XBOX360 launch games (which they have sampled secretly by courtesy of Microsoft themselves) aren´t as many times better than current xbox games as they were expecting them to be, that they do not at all surpass what can be shown on a nicely tuned PC. They are n other words just slightly better than current XBOX games. To get something that is not even twice as good as what can be seen on the current XBOX, Microsoft will charge people over 400 dollars for the premium version without any games. That makes 600 dollars minimum with two games and counting!
Now, 600 dollars may be affordable to those people who do nothing but play games. But to most of the average consumers this is too much money. It may be more attractive to get a Nintendo Revolution at 200 dollars next year with EVERYTHING included and adding a few hundred dollars more for two great Nintendo games. So they will wait it out.
What I am saying here, is that Microsoft don´t fit the bill! Yes, the XBOX360 may be cool enough to play on, but people will definitely want to see that it is really really worth playing them games coming out on it, before they go and invest that much money in it! Heck, people have Playstations, Xboxes and GameCubes as well as handhelds already stacked up in their rooms so why should they invest that much more money in a 1 1/2 upgrade? I think they simply wait it out until the games get 2 or 3 times better to look at, and until then will keep what they´ve got already. DS or PSP or XBOX or Playstation or GameCubes - whicever it is that they own now. Nintendo has been bashing Microsoft for a lomg time for coming out too early with their next-gen console, and I think we will see that things turn out exactly as I have said: people won´t buy it! At least not in the numbers Microsoft thinks! Sales may be big at the launch day, but will flatten out soon after. So it will probably be the same as with the PSP. If not, I will be surprised. But I think my theory will hold.
So that leaves for me to include the developers and how they will go about it. Well, they will follow the consumers tastes and develope for the gamesystems that are most popular of course. So they will follow closely what happens with Xbox 360 now and then they will decide if it is worth developing for. Nintendo is likely, though, to attract a lot of developers, and which they already has even now, who will want to utilize the fantastic opportunity that lies in front of them thanks to the new controlsystem coming on Nintendo Revolution. I just read a Gamesindustry.biz interview with several japanese developers who are crazy about the Nintendo Revolution and the opportunities for game development that it gives them.
The ease opportunities which the Revolution gives them, along with the ease of developement possible with it too, and the significant drop in costs, will set a new trend which I believe stands to be so big in the end that it will turn other developers away from Sony´s rock hard developement cycles and over to Nintendo as well as Microsoft. Sony apparently thinks they can tell developers that they are the King of it all, and that developers will just have to stay onboard nomatter how hard it is to develope for, and tell us who are the gamers that we will have to work hard to afford the games. It´s absolute nonsense, and contains a level of arrogance which will bring them down if they continue like that!
So no matter how much you may claim that I am not being realistic when I see Nintendo as being very successfull, attracting big numbers of developers and consumers alike, I see it written in the ongoing defacto situation in the videogamemarket! And what I see, is what Nintendo saw first.
Topic: More Sony Lies (Read 28884 times)
