http://www.gamerevolution.com/news/view.php?id=2051
Namco has to sell 500,000 copies of Ridge Racer 7 in order to profit. Considering there aren’t even that many PS3’s available, this probably won’t happen, especially if it takes Sony a while to produce that many systems.
Yeah I thought that was pretty funny.
Well, John Madden helped when he accidentally purchased 100,000 copies, thinking the Ridge Racer to be a large, flightless bird like the road-runner he could use to make the Trducken (if that is how it is spelt) even stronger.
Microsoft antecipated such a problem with game releasing costs and made XNA exactly for that. It cuts down the development costs for a game, specially in programmer manpower, by a huge factor. I’ve tried it out at college - I’m even going to implement the Fire Mouse project with it.
Oh, and this is what I pictured when I saw the title:
It made the what for that?
As far as I know, developpers are pissed off at Sony because the PS3 is a pain in the ass to develop for.
Sony’s motto for the year is “We screw everyone! Including ourselves!”
Seriously though, Releasing a game that needs 500k sales to profit, when there are barely that many units manufactured yet is just bad business. If there were a few million PS3s available(like in the year 2012), sure, but releasing it this early is going to hurt.
Exactly. Both Nintendo and Microsoft had antecipated that development costs would be a big problem with the new generation.
Microsoft tackled the problem with XNA. The best way to explain it is referring to DirectX.
Until the mid-90’s developing games for windows was an herculeous job. You had to make sure your game was compatible with every audio and video card in the market, and handling input from the mouse, keyboard and joystick was pretty hard. Then MS launched DirectX, which unifies the way program access these things. Direct3D and DirectDraw also do most of the work related to rendering images. In this way, game developers spent a little less time coding and more time on the artistic part of the game. XNA is an expansion of the original idea, but much more powerful. It makes development so simple that in some cases (like my Fire Mouse), almost all the work involved in making the game has to do with 3D modeling and drawing sprites.
IMO, however, the smartest approach to the game development problem was Nintendo’s. Games are the most costful to develop in the beggining of a system’s lifetime. So, for begginers, Nintendo is bringing back all of its greatest successes to Wii. It’s a sure thing they’ll sell a lot of these classic games during these first few months at nearly no cost, so they can focus their efforts and resources in a small group of games. And since there is pratically a well formed market for the Wii (in contrast to the X and PS3), developing games for it is a safer bet than doing so for the other two systems.
So, in short, my bet is that companies will develop mainly for Wii as of now, due to the well-formed market. Then for the X360, due to the lower dev costs. As for the PS3, the article in the first post already said it all.
Fire Mouse.
The name Saturn suddenly comes to mind.