Next Generation Software

[MikeRox]

at the start the games will be highly priced but will soon come down, look at your local GAME. triple a titles are 29.99 on day of release

thats more to do with tesco and Asda in particular selling games for very little profit enticing people into stores to buy groceries rather than because games shops want to sell them at that, they have to simply to compete as the supermarkets only stock the main titles, these are the titles where most of the gaming industry's revenue is generated and so not competing would be suicide.

With the next gen it's expected that the prices retailers have to pay to get games will increase, thus the price in stores will be forced up regardless. The problem comes when buyers refuse to fork out and development costs shoot up, somethings gonna give.

[Kotatsu Neko]

The industry is rich enough as it is. It doesn't need any more of our money (per game). It's greed and nothing more.

If a price hike does occcur, I intend to vote with my wallet.

The cost of development will rocket will next gen games. Where once a team, of 25-50 would suffice, teams of 100-150 will not be uncommon.

To give you an example of the extra work involved - this gen an artist makes a low resolution model, then puts it in the game. Next gen the artist must make an ultra high-res model in nurms or nurbs, then make a pretty high-res in game version. The ultra high res model is then used to generate normal maps for the high-res in game version. This gen the artist might be busy for an afternoon on this model, next gen he could easily be busy for a week.

High end games will use normal maps on every surface, every character, every vehicle, every weapon etc. And such wide use of normal mapping is just one new aspect of next gen development, there are others.

So the developers have more salaries to pay and so need more money. This can either come from raising a game's RRP, or asking the shops to lower their massive cut of the profits. Guess which one is going to happen!

There are many developers that think next gen is not needed as current hardware is sufficient, and that the enormous workload and costs will put many devs out of business.

[hankwangford]

Pre order software on Play.Com is currently ?39.99 for XBox 360 compared with ?29.99 for XBox if that is any pointer.

By the same merit the 360 is at ?400 preorder from Play. There's no way they're going to sell it for ?400.

I don't think we're going to see that huge a rise in development costs. Thinking about it, programming isn't going to change a whole lot. In fact, in the early stages I could see coders having it a little easier with extra processing power and RAM to handle things that aren't going to change a whole lot from today. Audio output reached its peak this generation and I'm sure today's music technology and composers are more than capable of handling the change from 5.1 to 7.1. So really, it just comes down to the artists, and what we're going to see is two things:

1) Smaller developers relying more and more on Middleware such as XNA and Renderware

And far more importantly:

2) Everyone's favourite buzzword: Outsourcing. You watch. They'll send a ton of work involving environments and character models off to the Ukraine or China on the cheap.

This is all my unprofessional, never written one line of code unless it was 10 Print "Hello" before in my life though, so...

[MikeRox]

yes but that doesn't take into account people are expecting shizzly nizzly graphics from the next gen and your solutions would pretty much involve what we've got now with maybe the odd extra special effect, or in otherwords, the types of ports that killed the DC in the eyes of the public (Tomb Raider anyone?) which could potentially put people off bothering to buy next gen consoles because they don't look much better than the consoles we've already got.

[Ady]

re: Kokatsu Neko

I guess we're all screwed then. Gamers and game makers.

But at least the graphics will be nice, eh?

[Kotatsu Neko]

re: Kokatsu Neko

I guess we're all screwed then. Gamers and game makers.

But at least the graphics will be nice, eh?

Don't worry, EA will survive.

[Mofoman]

I think the main problem is these arseholes who insist on pirating games with no respect for gamers or the industry that we love, whilst I do not mind the odd gamer wiht a decent collection downloading a game of the net to try before he buys, the guys who chip their ps2 , xbox, or whatever else with the intention solely to buy and play pirated software is not on and we are now seeing the fallout of this, bigger companies simply swallowing smaller ones, and others simply going out of business as they need the profit from every sale, this allows these big publishers to then determine the price of most games and in general that means prices going up, no matter what profits they are making, they need to keep their shareholders happy.

In my opinion, it is piracy more than anything that is driving the prices of games up for us gamers as well as rising development costs but piracy imo is one of the biggest factors nowadays as it is with DVD's.

[MikeRox]

at the end of the day tho, these same people probably wouldn't have bought the games legitimately anyway and so just add extra hardware sales for manufacturers to wank over and pimp to devs. Id say only companies losing money on hardware sales actually lose out to most cases of piracy.

[Leon Retro]

Are 1024bit games running on holo-systems gonna cost ?1000 a pop?

[hankwangford]

yes but that doesn't take into account people are expecting shizzly nizzly graphics from the next gen and your solutions would pretty much involve what we've got now with maybe the odd extra special effect.

I disagree. There's just as many talented artists in China as there are in the main game development countries (America, Japan and at a push the UK); they can just offset extra development costs by shipping the artwork out to somewhere it can be done just as well for less money.

It's the ONLY way around it.

As I've said, regardless of whether we like it or not, the next gen will be the AGE of middleware.