4 ms·
Everyone seems to be beating up on this story. The title is link bait & hyperbole but let me argue why I think the writer is at least pulling on the right threa
by acgourley 14y ago
Everyone seems to be beating up on this story. The title is link bait & hyperbole but let me argue why I think the writer is at least pulling on the right threads.
1. Processing power won't matter, we've crossed a line where the real bottleneck is content creation not pixel rendering. Assassins Creed III at 300 people over 3 years shows this. Your next phone will be powerful enough to render the best games we make.
2. Your second next phone will have a good way to get this to your TV. Either through a wireless standard or a well designed dock.
3. Yes, controllers matter for some games. But everyone has agreed what a controller should be (dual analog, d-pad, start/select, 4 buttons, and 2 shoulders, 2 triggers). Companies will make good BT versions of these and this problem is solved.
4. The expected price of games is dropping, and console makers are simply in denial about this.
5. Set-top boxes running Android, like Ouya, for many of the above reasons, are going to gain a strong foothold. They're going to be the "just works" solution you buy at walmart. They're going to get bluetooth controllers into you hands. They're going to get you used to gaming on a TV for cheap & free.
- majormajor 14y agoHow do you see your first and fourth points interacting? Companies trying to make up for lower sales prices on volume, while still taking ever-more time and effort to create the content?
- acgourley 14y agoI admit I don't know, and as always the industry will exist on a spectrum not as a couple dots. But I think the whole spectrum is shifting such that only a few franchises/studios can pull off a $60 game, and it will be so risky to start that effort up that it will only be trusted to those few. You'll still see block buster titles from block buster names at block buster prices but fewer... and everything else will move down the price spectrum.
- jiggy2011 14y agoI don't know if the expected price of games is going down. Skyrim is £34.99 on Steam (maybe $60 or so) and sold a recording breaking 10 million units on the platform alone. So that is £350,000,000 in revenue from one platform. By the time the game is at bargain bin prices they probably won't be too far from making a billion from it across all platforms once you factor in DLC and everything else. Not sure about numbers regards processing power, but if you compare an iPhone 5 to something like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtgW20IEm0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtgW20IEm0 (CryEngine 3) it looks like that gulf will take come crossing yet if next gen console games look like that. Stuff like the Ouya is interesting, but I'd be surprised if big publishers would want to touch it with a pole. The open-ness would probably lead to mass scale piracy.