You are right here, but just not looking at it the right way. Necessity IS created by an unfulfilled need. Companies need/want money. They get money by making and selling successful products. If you have competition for you type of project, then when you go to make a new product (in the same field), you know you need to not only improve upon the old model of your product, but also have to make it better than whatever the competition, which will drive innovation faster.
I see where you're coming from, but I think you're being a bit cynical. Sure, there are those who feel compelled to innovate just to earn money or otherwise "win," but there are those to innovate just for the sake of innovation. Sure, they get paid for their efforts too, but it's not always about what the other guy is doing. Sure, prosperous times can lead to complacency, which opens the door for your competitors, but I disagree that pressures such as this actually
speed innovation. Either you have a brilliant idea or you don't. The guy who invented Velcro did so because he got a bur on his sock and went, "Oh, duh." Not because there was a space race going on.
The real point is, in a competitive marketplace, all of this stuff balances out. If the market leader doesn't let complacency take over and continue to innovate, then they deserve to stay on top. If a competitor comes up with a brilliant innovation, they deserve to be rewarded appropriately. As long as there's nothing to throw off the balance, the best competitors will prevail, and not only is that okay, it's preferred.
Anyways, I'm done arguing this one. You think Sony could handle a monopoly, and it would be better for everyone.
I say bullcrap, that a monopoly would be bad for the gaming industry as one company could control everything, and that no matter how 'good' they are, they will corrupt eventually.
We just gonna have to agree to disagree on this one.
Again, it's easy to claim Sony Too but much harder to support it. You feel comfortable disagreeing because you don't feel compelled to support your FUD with anything more substantial than, "It
could happen." Well, sure, it could, so we should keep a wary eye, but that doesn't mean supporting the company we
know wants to fuck up the market balance.
Cthulhu for President! Aren't you tired of always choosing the lesser evil?
Like I said, entering the market is not as easy as you seem to think.
Well, no kidding. Every business has a cost of entry, and some are higher than others. That's just a fact of life. A business may be somewhat exclusive by nature, but anti-competitive behavior by existing players just makes those conditions all the worse.
You put them up on too high of a pedestal. They are a company. They don't want to be your 'buddy', they want your money just like everyone else, and will do whatever it takes to get that.
As a business owner, I find your gross generalization to be rather offensive, and if you truly feel that way, I would recommend you find new people to do business with, because it seems you've been choosing poorly.
Activision's president who has been in the industry for 20+ years was commenting on how game development cost have gone up every single generation, (which includes the PS1-PS2 generation). And he said that cost were rising for this generation as well (Despite them releasing on the same amount of platforms as last gen.)
The truth is that the new technology is what has increased development cost so much, and these rising cost have caused a domino effect with midsize devs closing down, companies milking DLC, and Micro-transactions in just about every other AAA game.
Keep in mind Activision have an interest in both crying about their costs and hyping just how extravagant their extravaganzas are. That said, yes, as graphics improve, it takes more to produce them, and ditto for game engines, but you can't argue that the need to develop multiple engines simultaneously doesn't also substantially increase cost and complexity. Like I said, doing two at once just
magnifies all of the issues you cite here.
It should be common sense that it doesn't take 100 extra people just to port a game to another console
Then why do multi-plat teams tend to be so much larger? On really big projects, ports are often handled by entirely separate studios. Do you suppose that's cheap?
If it was SOOO much cheaper to launch just on one console, then why don't we see more exclusives? And even with the PS4 having a 2-1 lead, developers are still launching games on the Xbone because they know that the amount of money required to do a decent port is far less than the extra money they will make from the ~10M users.
Well, it seems like as PS4 increases its lead, we are starting to see more exclusives, especially from smaller studios where resources are more limited. It's also starting to manifest in larger titles like Street Fighter;
another title seemingly held back by feature parity last generation, as a matter of fact.
The reason 3rd party games have a bigger budget than 1st party games is because they have a larger audience to sell too, and so they can afford to spend more money on the game because they know that they can make it back.
With first party games, you are only selling to 1/2 or less of the audience of a 3rd party game, so you can't have as big of a budget.
That's why we don't see massive titles like a Skyrim or GTA V launch as an exclusive. They are more expensive not because they are launching on multiple platforms, but because they are simply bigger games -- and they can afford to be bigger more expensive games because they have a bigger audience to sell too.
Except, that doesn't really apply so much in a lopsided market, which was the point I was making originally; we all benefit from a lopsided market, from developers to gamers. No, GTA5 couldn't afford to launch as an exclusive, because it launched in to a split market. GTA3 could, because it launched in to a lopsided market. PS2 got a lot of exclusives just by virtue of being the dominant platform. A game could be made by a single team instead of a team and a half, likely sooner and at higher quality, hit 100M users, and if they were successful, they might hire someone to port their game to the smaller platforms while they got started on the sequel. You see a lot of multi-platform support right now because not too long ago we were tied at 0M units and studios were already geared for multi-plat development from last generation. As PS4 extends its lead, there will be less and less reason to launch day and date on XBox. That will manifest with the smallest games from the smallest studios first, and trickle up to larger games from larger devs. The people laid off from the porting departments will just go out and form indy studios to make even more games for us.
Do you at least see my point?
I see what you're trying to say, but really, it's just an argument in favor of a lopsided market. The split market is what dictates multi-platform support, and multi-platform support increases cost and reduces quality, which causes game devs to play it safe instead of experiment, and overall increases the risk of catastrophic failure of the entire studio. That's in no way a win for anyone, dude. lol
I couldn't get team sizes for IW or Dice, but if you know, then please tell
To be honest, I've looked in the past, and it's kind of hard to find apples-to-apples comparisons, but my Google Fu may be weak. I just get the impression that multi-plat teams are larger because I hear about Sony's teams, and I think, "Wow, that's a lot of dudes." When I hear about Acti and Ubi teams, I usually think, "Holy fuck." lol It makes sense to me though, because I know how hard it is to get even a comparatively simple application up and running, so when you scale that up to the level of something like a full game, trying to develop and maintain two versions simultaneously would be a significant undertaking, if not downright daunting. To some extent, it will depend on the tools you're using, but even if your tools do have strong multi-plat support, the more complex your project, the less likely it will be you can tick the "Also build for XBox" checkbox and have it just work. Ironically, this also has the effect of stifling innovation, because it discourages ambition; every time you reach a little higher, your second build target pulls you back to Earth that much harder. Actually, this is probably even more true for the larger teams who are using custom engines rather than something like Unreal.
Dude, it is as simple as having 2-3 coders working to optimize one version, while the other 2-3 work to optimize the other. (2-3 extra people don't cost that much).
It may not seem like it, but doubling the number of guys working on the engine can actually be pretty significant.
And developers usually do not care to take advantage of platform specific features because it would just be extra work for them that would likely end up earning them zero extra dollars unless it is something significant that they can replicate on both platforms.
Like I said earlier, if a developer really wants to do that, then they have the freedom to, and there are some examples such as Tomb Raider DE, where the developers added some extra features that took advantage of both PS4 and X1 exclusive features! Nobody is going to veto the developers right to do that. Microsoft's policy was just the the game had to have the same content on the disc, not that they couldn't utilize other platform's specific tech like the Wii's motion control stuff.
Except, a lot of developers do take pride in their work, and others just get off on inventing stuff, so they can and do strive to make use of every advantage they can get their hands on. And Microsoft can and do veto those additional efforts if they feel it would bring them too much shame. See below.
Any error in their tracking estimates is not going to be big enough to matter as they are fairly accurate.
I mean seriously, if you are a sales analyst working for sony to try and project how many consoles they need to make in 2015 to keep up with demand, and they give you 13.5m as a sell through for last year, you can use that they estimate that they will likely need (for example) 16.5m units for this year based on a 22% rise from first to second year. And even if lets say their tracking was 100k off and they only sold 13.4 in 2014, then that would mean that your projection would only be off by ~150k for the whole year which is not bad.
Looking at last year's sales to roughly predict next year's sales strikes me as a fairly reasonable extrapolation. What I objected to was taking a relatively small period of sales in a relatively small number of countries measured at launch and then using that sample to declare a minimum sold through a relatively large amount of time later, and over a relatively large number of countries.
The PS3 mistakes and awe full cocky sony attitude towards the consumer's reaction was in large part due to their overconfidence, and domination in past years.
Like I said, there were certainly some boneheaded business decisions and PR quotes though to be fair, many of those statements were twisted pretty severely by the media but again, I'm not really seeing any anticompetitive or anti-consumer policies.
All I was saying is that if the PS2 had strong competition, then it may have reached lower prices sooner.
Or maybe the price would've remained higher, because they weren't building as many, so they couldn't get them as cheaply.
For example, Sony was willing to sell PS3 at a loss for years because they had to compete with Xbox and Wii.
If PS3 had dominated at $599, then you really think they would have dropped the price like they did?
Well, yes, because eventually they would have exhausted the pool of buyers willing to buy in at that price point. Again, the price of the hardware serves as a barrier to entry. Who benefits from a high barrier?
No, I never said that. I'm saying competition drives prices lower faster.
Why do ya think Xbone when from $500 to $330 + 2 games (BF) in just one year??
Competition.
Except that's not competition. It's an indication that their brand is failing. As I explained before, buying market share is an indication that your product
doesn't offer a strong value proposition. If it did, there would be no need to buy sales. Competitions have winners, and you ain't it. And as we discussed earlier, a competitive market is one where everyone is rewarded by merit, and deep pockets don't really qualify as merit, when the real goal is fostering innovation. There's nothing particularly innovative about busting out the checkbook. We want to see a competition, not Paul Allen paying the refs to spot 10 points to the 'hawks, right?
IDK, they were losing brick tons last gen. with the PS3, and still managed to grow their first party stable by a couple studios + growing ND to a much bigger size.
Sure, but imagine what they could've done if they weren't taking a $300 loss per unit. Yes, they had studio growth in Gen7, but nothing like the growth they had in Gen5 and Gen6. Which actually shoots another hole in your "successful Sony = lazy Sony" theory.
If they make more money, it usually just goes back into their pockets, not new games
.Just look at Nintendo for example. How many new game studios did they open up during the Wii generation back when they were making bank like crazy?
As I just pointed out, that wasn't the case with Sony when they were on top. That's where the term moneyhat even comes from; Sony's proclivity to fund games no one else was even interested in supporting. Just look at all the crazy stuff they've produced over the years, and that peaked during the PS2 era.
I mean have you ever heard one of them announce "oh sorry, we are canceling this game because we are losing too much money on HW, or we are closing this studio because we can't make a profit on HW."
lol Well, no, they're not really going to announce it in those terms. Instead, those games simply won't get started in the first place, because there's no surplus in the budget to cover the costs. If they weren't taking such a big loss on the hardware, we may have gotten TLoU
and ND's space game, or maybe another game from Bend or Psygnosis, or something risky and cool from a new studio.
If that was true, then why didn't Sony drop the PS4 price in the US for the holidays, or after that?
And while I'm sure they will likely drop it this year to keep up, I personally just don't see $299 yet.
Well, like I said, it's more complicated than tying the price directly to the cost. First, there are R&D costs to recover. Also, some stuff needs money today, like PSN. Etcetera, etcetera. Also, there's consumer psychology to consider as well, as I mentioned earlier. A single, large price cut can actually produce more sales overall than a series of smaller cuts.
Interesting. It wouldn't surprise me. Can I have a link plz? Like what sort of features?
"Minority Report" controller-less gestures in the RTS EndWar. Basically, you could control the entire game just by talking to it and waving your hands around. The gestures couldn't be done on XBox because there was no suitable stand for the camera, so it only had the "standard" configuration of voice controls backed by a gamepad.
Link 1 Link 2 You may think that sounds dumb or whatever, but apparently MS though it was cool enough that it needed vetoing, and apparently they'd vetoed enough stuff in the past it was worth mentioning he needed Microsoft's permission, even though he thought they'd let it slide.
Also interesting. But I doubt they have much control over bigger games because they obviously need 3rd party support.
There is no way they could do that to publishers pushing big games like Cod, AC, Batman, or The Witcher, because to say "you can't publish on out platform" would be just as bad for them as for the publisher as it would give the competition a AAA exclusive for free.
Well, do you consider EndWar and Street Fighter to be big games from major publishers? How about Diablo? Maybe AC
arity? How many copies did Parity sell on the Bone? 5M? That's like $45M in royalties for MS. You don't think MS would gladly risk giving up $45M to avoid another performance shaming? You say polices like these mostly affect "little guys" like indies. First, I'm not sure why that makes it better in any way at all, but more to the point, MS kinda see
everyone as "the little guy."
Of coarse I'm not condoning that behavior, but if I was making a MP game, I obviously wouldn't put extra time into making an awesome feature that only half of my user base could use, and just give the middle finger to everyone who "chose the wrong platform".
Small things like using the PS4 touchpad to scroll maps, or using the X1 rumble triggers are fine, and have been done plenty in games, but it would be wrong in my opinion to go out and do a whole bunch of special stuff just for one platform as it alienates part of you user base.
Like I said, it has nothing to do with alienating users and everything to do with taking advantage of a platform's strengths. If a feature is not possible or not allowed on your platform, well, tough shit. No one is punishing you. It's not about half-assed efforts. Shit's just not possible. Them's the breaks. Take it up with your platform holder. The punishment/crime would be holding back the more capable platform simply so the public at large don't become aware it's more capable.
So my example doesn't count as anti consumer?
I'm sure I could find more examples if I dig a little ;p
The fact that you need to dig for examples to attempt to counter the laundry list of complaints against MS should tell you everything you need to know.
Like I said, they are a company just like any other.
It seems like they have a special place in your heart, and so you probably feel like I'm insulting you personally whenever I insult them. I'm not though. I'm just saying watch out because they can be just as bad as anyone else, and if you become too attached, then you will become blind/oblivious to whenever they try to skrew you over.
Sort of like how when your in love with someone you tend to overlook their faults, and put them up on this high pedestal to where they can do no wrong.
lol No, I don't take it personally. I just find your accusations to be unfounded at best. And there's nothing unusual about feeling loyalty towards those who treat you right and animosity towards those who treat you wrong, whether individuals or groups of individuals. Do you really feel like you don't have a good relationship with
any of the businesses you deal with? You walk away from every single interaction feeling like
somebody got screwed, and it was probably you? =/
And yeah, sometimes you get burned, like my ex-wife, who turned out to be a bit of a sociopath. Guess what. I stopped associating with her too.
