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Iwata predicted the current state of XBOX and PlayStation…

and yet he didnt predict the failure of wiiu.


This has little to do hardware performance but more to do with the scope of the games have increased dramatically. Zelda and mario also have long development cycles.

Nintendo chose not to join the performance race because they didnt' want to sell hardware at a loss. They also understood their first party titles are their biggest assets and that familes, aka their core demographic, don't care about having the best visuals.
 

Thief1987

Member
Totally fair, since we all know they had to scrap the game mid development and start again. Very genuine post of good faith there...
They announced restart of development 5.5 years ago. It's pretty much development cycle of the standard AAA. More to it, many AAA games took less time to develop, and we haven't seen even a single screenshot of metroid so far. Where is this magical nintendo proficiency?
 
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recursive

Member
Video worth watching. Puts a lot of things going on today into context.

TLDR: Iwata basically said that XBOX/PlayStation focusing only on chasing power/performance/visuals over time vs gameplay innovation will lead to more complicated development cycles and fewer output of quality experiences for people to enjoy.




3rd parties can do whatever the fuck they want so this isn't really a completely valid position. I am assuming this has to do with exclusives where I don't think graphics are what is causing xbox problems (see craig) but it may have slowed sony down.
 

Woopah

Member
Nintendo is dealing with lengthening development times just like everyone else.

They just get around it by having a very strong network of partner studios, in addition to the first party investments they are making.
 
They announced restart of development 5.5 years ago. It's pretty much development cycle of the standard AAA. More to it, many AAA games took less time to develop, and we haven't seen even a single screenshot of metroid so far. Where is this magical nintendo proficiency?
I'm sure they're saving it for Switch 2.
 

SonGoku

Member
Video worth watching. Puts a lot of things going on today into context.

TLDR: Iwata basically said that XBOX/PlayStation focusing only on chasing power/performance/visuals over time vs gameplay innovation will lead to more complicated development cycles and fewer output of quality experiences for people to enjoy.




I dont know about this... Compared to the big consoles switch has no gameplay innovations
The only thing going for it is that by relying on a generation behind technology Nintendo can slow down rising development costs, they are not doing anything to prevent it just delaying it.

The biggest let down of this generation so far has been crossgen games, especially from Sony all its games so far with few smaller games exceptions have been developed to run on PS4. I guess we'll see if Nintendo ditches crossgen after first year of Switch 2 or not
 
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Raven117

Gold Member
I agree that after the 7th gen 'next gen gameplay' stagnated a lot and most attention was put on cosmetics mostly. And this generation it's even worse.
Yup. And I really can’t blame the studios. They have to make money…. So going with what’s been proven to with with iterative improvements is a safer bet than something that is innovative in gameplay.

Hell, unless you can slap Nintendo on the box, the “innovative” games gets done…. Does well… but not well enough…. And some bigger more pedigree studio copies it and makes millions….few companies can pull off that first game and continue to exist.
 

MacReady13

Member
"Iwata Knew", while holding a Wii U gamepad. The pic for the video is unintentionally hilarious.
Yet almost every game released on there is now on Switch selling 10's of millions of copies, proving his point exactly.

People who are after graphics and "experiences" are wasting their time. Games are popular because of gameplay! I'm unsure as to why that is so hard for these companies to grasp! Make the games fun to play with actual gameplay included and you're more than likely onto a winner.
 

nani17

are in a big trouble
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OIG4.OC59XaCb2AXb1uuqoRIW
 
Games aren't just graphics.
The more features people demand, the more details people demand, the more intricacy people demand, the more complexity people demand. All of this increases the time taken to develop games. The graphics are just the most visible and obvious thing, so people latch on to it as though it's the sole focus of the arms race.

Also underpowered hardware is just as cumbersome to develop for because you need to make workarounds to get things to perform well.

Destructible environments. Being able to interact with everything in a map and not be blocked off by invisible walls. More complicated physics engines. More sophisticated enemy AI. More challenging bosses. More new, unique and interesting mechanics.

All of these take time to develop and even longer to test. Testing is the shit you guys always completely ignore in dev conversations. Any small change you make requires sometimes hours of testing to make sure it doesn't break anything or to make sure there are no obvious glitches or random edge situations that cause hours and hours of online mockery.

We as gamers demand more and more and more and it's not just the fucking graphics. All of that requires more and more and more development and testing.

We just now have to live with that.
 
For all those saying Iwata wasn’t the only one, sure there have been others but when it’s the head of one of the 3 Platform Holders it’s worth noting. Especially considering some platforms have pushed the technology aspects of their console and this sort of flies in the face of that.

Regardless of who predicted it, the point is legit and the growing budgets and time games take to make are a problem.
 
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Video worth watching. Puts a lot of things going on today into context.

TLDR: Iwata basically said that XBOX/PlayStation focusing only on chasing power/performance/visuals over time vs gameplay innovation will lead to more complicated development cycles and fewer output of quality experiences for people to enjoy.




Nintendo's output isn't much better. It took 7 years to get a glorified Zelda DLC.
 

odhiex

Member
I watched the video and I like Iwata a lot. I think he was one of the CEOs who understands game development. However, his comment was made back in the Wii days and was addressing the next generations from Sony (PS3) and Microsoft (X360). Even if it is relatable to the current consoles, that doesn't mean he knew.

The past two console generations were not solely defined by big-budget AAA games, there are hundreds and thousands of other games indies, AAs, and service games that found success. They were relatively small and less labour-intensive. Of course, for a solo indie dev, it may take a while for them to release a game, not because of the hardware complexity but rather a budget constraint, resources and ambitions.
 

A.Romero

Member
It was not an amazing foresight that led him to that. It was already happening by the time he took that stance and that's the reason he opted Nintendo out of the power competition.

Software in general has become more complex since it's inception, specially multimedia. Even going from NES to SNES implied more development complexity. I mean, someone has to draw all those millions of polygons systems can process. Someone has to play complex orchestal music. Not really a difficult idea to grasp, specially if you are involved in any kind of development.

Even Nintendo has been dragged to play the complexity game... Their current games are many times more complex than what they used to be. They just decided to follow a different path to compete and it happened to work just fine but it wouldn't work for any company in the world, they have the right mix to make it work this way (because they just couldn't compete in the other way).
 

SonGoku

Member
What? What did we get on the big consoles that has never been done before or done better than before?
I never claimed they had more innovation just that switch does not have a gameplay innovation advantage over them, in any case thats what i meant if it was not clear. So the point about chasing gfx over gameplay innovation is moot
I know. All of them are on the same boat, but, somehow, compared to the big consoles, Switch is worse?
I dont know if my eng was broken on that, but to make it clear what i meant is Switch offered no gameplay innovations that they were all on the same boat.
 
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IAmRei

Member
6 years between the last two belda games, 7 years since the last mainline mario and new one nowhere to be seen. Mario Kart? Even more. Smash, etc. They are not looking like an example of high productivity, they just can pad space with cheap trash and inferior ports of 20-30 years old games for full price.
Nah, You just ignore other releases. Their output is fine. You are just generalizing and not the part of the target
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
It was an inevitability, even with Nintendo. If consoles didn’t do it, phones would have done it. And if that happened phones would be killing consoles much faster.

I like what he says in theory, but you’d essentially be ‘fighting the future’ and even Nintendo could only do that for so long. He also was unfortunately unable to see how AI is about to change things for development.

The more I think about what he’s saying here, the more it feels like a time capsule quote rather than futuresight.

Plus I think people are idiots for linking PlayStation and Xbox and treating them as if they are in the same situation. Yes development Cycles are longer. That's true. But it's very very clear that PlayStation and Xbox are nothing alike as far as the successes or lack thereof that they are seeing.

Why do we have to act like Helldivers 2 is equal to Hellblade 2? These two companies just made a game with the word hell in it and they are both a sequel to the first game with the word hell in it, but we are seeing two totally different consumer responses.

Sony and MS are going into totally different directions and it's very clear.

- One is talking about making a native handheld for next gen, whereas the other has already made a non-native handheld to work with its current generation console that's selling in the 100s of thousands.

- one will be making a half gen .5 console whereas the other stated that their Pro console was already made at release called the series x.
 

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
I'm seeing an avalanche of similar opinions all over social media, and among fellow gamers out there. These traditional consoles are not living up to the hype, and as of yet they are not worth their asking prices. Sure, Sony is doing better than MS, but still having issues with delivering first party games, and convincing half the PS4 owners to upgrade.

Why people act like Covid didn't happen?
Remember mandatory work from home?

The issue Iwata described is more global. Of course companies targeting the best visuals are impacted as well, but nowadays, even on shit hardware, you are still enduring how development workflows and tools have evolved. An infinite stack of middlewares that make things obtuse and waste your previous hardware resources, especially on weak hardware. Even if you don't seek great visuals, you are still going to waste a precious time trying to accommodate to all this shit, and you won't even feel like you are in total control.

My expectation is that at some point, slightly better hardware will not be able to compensate for all the shit we stack up to make games ("my game is a 2D retro game, so you need to have 10 GB of RAM to run it"). Hopefully at some point we will give up with these "generic engines that need to run on everything" and go back to optimized, purposed built engines for a specific hardware. This will happen when we will realize that we cannot make any progress through brute force in the hardware department, as it will become the only way forward.

I think the cost to making exotic game engines just cause way too much nowadays compared to 20 years ago. The last specific game engine that was created that we know of is the Decima engine used by Kojima and Gorilla Games right?
 

Furball

Member
Nintendo's output isn't much better. It took 7 years to get a glorified Zelda DLC.
You forget they still has other game to fill up .

Xenoblade and fire emblem only take 3 year between each game while got post game support and big DLC .

Pokemon is also 2 to 3 year between each major installment and fill the gap with smaller game .
 
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Fennec

Member
"Iwata Knew", while holding a Wii U gamepad. The pic for the video is unintentionally hilarious.
Well....the WiiU gamepad led to the Switch, who led to the Steam Deck and its many clones...and it's easy to bet that next-gen consoles will follow this form factor as well.
 
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cireza

Member
think the cost to making exotic game engines just cause way too much nowadays compared to 20 years ago. The last specific game engine that was created that we know of is the Decima engine used by Kojima and Gorilla Games right?
There are a ton of dedicated engines. Sonic Team have their Hedgehog Engine, Team Ninja have their own engine, Omega Force too, Retro Studios as well, God Eater 3 has a custom engine, BotW certainly doesn't run on UE5, Xenoblade games etc...

And what is really interesting is that all these games run (or could run) on the weak hardware that is Switch with good performance. Sometimes even excellent results, such Metroid Prime Remastered. Omega Force had Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem musou run at 60fps on Switch...
 

jufonuk

not tag worthy
I think ps6 and Xbox 2880 will see some drastic differences from what we have this gen. Handhelds, semi-pcs, maybe both.

Either way, its true the constant chase for better visuals ain't holding up anymore.
Oh look Sony and Ms to Nintendo

Kinect, PS Move anyone ?
s reactions mr GIF


I just wanted to use this gif.

It’s not like Nintendo didn’t copy sega.

Or sega Nintendo. Or anyone else.

Let’s all just enjoy this hobby before it may go to GAAS model forever.

So retro gaming it is woo.
 
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RickMasters

Member
Tbh I would freeze modern graphics where we are to adjust game budget on the next years. Horizon FW, Spiderman 2, Alan Wake 2 have a nice bar of graphics to be standard. We can stay here 10 years.
Agreed. And focus on things like frame rate and physics and AI. If we could play all games at 60FPS and 4K with a lot of physical elements and really good AI, I’d be happy.



Funny thing is graphics have gotten so good as standard that art style is what catches my eyes these days.
 

RickMasters

Member
Oh look Sony and Ms to Nintendo

Kinect, PS Move anyone ?
s reactions mr GIF


I just wanted to use this gif.

It’s not like Nintendo didn’t copy sega.

Or sega Nintendo. Or anyone else.

Let’s all just enjoy this hobby before it may go to GAAS model forever.

So retro gaming it is woo.
Lies. Sega did what Nintendont ( sorry I’ve always wanted to use that one)
 

RickMasters

Member
Nintendo bullshit and cover for they didn't want to spend money on the internet and high def games and gave us the Wii and Wii U.
Still, I guess retirement homes miss the Wii. The Wii us up there with the Atari Jaguar as the worst consoles I've ever owned
Well….. supario galaxy and the virtual console seemed dope. I never owned one bit those two things always seemed cool to me.




I heard that not even virtual console games carry over to switch. Typical Nintendo bullshit if true.
 

SHA

Member
Video worth watching. Puts a lot of things going on today into context.

TLDR: Iwata basically said that XBOX/PlayStation focusing only on chasing power/performance/visuals over time vs gameplay innovation will lead to more complicated development cycles and fewer output of quality experiences for people to enjoy.




He's right but I don't want to live in a world where I only enjoy playing Zelda and Mario, that's really boring.
 

KungFucius

King Snowflake
6 years between the last two belda games, 7 years since the last mainline mario and new one nowhere to be seen. Mario Kart? Even more. Smash, etc. They are not looking like an example of high productivity, they just can pad space with cheap trash and inferior ports of 20-30 years old games for full price.
How many people worked on those games in that time period? It is not like they are desperately trying to crank the next one out. They work on concepts for a long time before going into full blown development. For all we know Mario has been finished for a while or alternatively, they spent years working on several concepts and canned the one they put the most into in favor of something they figured out later.
 
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