Most of us in the industry saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, usually with every hush-hush, brand-new, top-secret dev kit we got given that now has fifty times the memory and disk space to fill, and we ask ourselves... how the hell are we going to generate enough content in exactly the same time frame with not much more budget?geizr said:I've been saying this for a while now, but it is nice to see that someone with a lot more visibility and clout than me now shares the same opinion.Yahtzee Croshaw said:Certainly I'm of the opinion that the triple-A industry is not sustainable in its current form...
It's just not sustainable, and Microsoft and Sony aren't helping with their who's-got-the-biggest-dick competition every few years. Take the next round of consoles... there is absolutely no need for them. It's tons more RAM and super-beefy GPUs just for the sake of it. Neither first party actually asked the question: "does the industry need this", because the answer would have been no. I'm not too sure what the guy-in-the-street is expecting from these whizz-bang machines, but I can tell you now - he'll be disappointed. Same games, but with more realistic water and lighting. Whoopdey-do.
What do they mean for us actually making the games? Much larger teams (and we've proven quite conclusively that we can't manage the ones we have in a sensible manner), huge budgets, and that means unrealistic sales predictions otherwise the game's budget sheet can't possibly show a profit. The games, of course, won't sell nearly that many, and lots of publishers are going to be taking big losses on title after title. Is this going to (finally) be the wake-up call for the industry? I really, really hope so.