Developers Not thrilled with Nextgen?

[TheChefO]

Jaffe:

"I'm no longer that excited about next-gen technology; it means budgets go up.

"It sucks. The biggest thing I want is what you get from the PSP and the 3DS - it's always on, there's a sleep mode and I can just hit a button and I'm right back where I was and I don't have to go through all the boot-up s***."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-03-13-jaffe-i-couldnt-care-less-about-next-gen

I wonder if this type of mindset is widely shared by developers and if so, perhaps this is partly the reason Sony/MS are attempting to Wii this upcoming gen.

I'm sure there are quite a few developers that are pushing for top end performance, but what percentage? Perhaps after interviewing enough developers and publishers, Sony and MS came to the conclusion that a watered down nextgen console is what the majority of the development community wants.

I think such a mindset will quickly lead to the irrelevance of consoles and ceding the entire market to IOS and Android.

The real issue here isn't Jaffe not wanting new hardware, the issue is the perceived need for an ever more unsustainable budget increase for delivering nextgen experiences. Investment into more efficient development techniques and libraries is increasingly becoming an immediate need.

 

[AlphaWolf]

You have major developers also saying they were ready to see next gen last year. Jaffe might not be alone, but he certainly isn't speaking for all of them.

 

[Rangers]

jaffe has been on a mobile/gameplay first/graphics suck tip for a while now. thats why he quit eat sleep play.

dunno if he's legit about that or just not wanted in the hardcore space any more and had no choice.

 

[Brad Grenz]

Jaffe's right about an instant suspend/sleep mode. That is long overdue for home consoles. You shouldn't have to leave a console at full power, paused in a game because you want to run an errand or get dinner but aren't in a good place to save. Vita has a lot of things I expect from the next gen, including that quick suspend function, but also real multitasking and day one digital availability for every single game.

That said, I think he's way off base about the power thing. The comments from most other developers I've seen are in direct contradiction. People from Epic, DICE and CryTek have all very publicly been agitating for high spec next generation systems with bleeding edge processing power and lots of RAM. I've been saying this for a while, but I think if the big 3 all "Wii out" this cycle no one will see a compelling reason to upgrade and the whole industry could crash. Mark Rein seems to agree because he's basically been saying the same thing this GDC.

I'm also reminded of the famous "two gamecubes duct-taped together" speech Chris Hecker gave about the Wii. The idea that increased processing, storage and RAM capabilities aren't important to gameplay advances is a pure fiction. In the case of the Wii that meant the hardware was literally incapable of truly fulfilling the promise of its revolutionary input mechanism, but the same is true of traditional console evolution. A game like Assassin's Creed would have been utterly impossible on the PS2, Gamecube or Xbox. If we don't get a meaningful jump in capabilities we'll be missing out on the opportunity for that kind of innovation.

That's one of the things that makes me so nervous when I hear rumors like the 720 is a SoC with a 6670 level GPU or the PS4 has gone x86. Any CPU AMD can field will struggle to just match the capabilities of Cell, and GPGPU doesn't seem ready for meaningful physics simulation. It's great for prettifying scenes as Physx shows, but only because the data is moving one way. And any problem you have to brute force on the GPU is just taking time away from the actual rendering, something GPUs are actually efficient at.

 

[egoless]

Delete

 

[Acert93]

jaffe has been on a mobile/gameplay first/graphics suck tip for a while now. thats why he quit eat sleep play.

dunno if he's legit about that or just not wanted in the hardcore space any more and had no choice.

Bingo. Dude's business orientation is clearly going the *opposite* direction from the market ebb/flow and going more toward the mobile market. It is like Rein praising UE3 on the WiiU -- true or not, what do you expect him to say? And indeed there may be some truth in what Jaffe is saying, but I wouldn't take it as an indication of "developers" likes and dislikes, especially as others noted there are developers who have been saying they want and need more power to attain their creative vision.

 

[Nesh]

That said, I think he's way off base about the power thing. The comments from most other developers I've seen are in direct contradiction. People from Epic, DICE and CryTek have all very publicly been agitating for high spec next generation systems with bleeding edge processing power and lots of RAM. I've been saying this for a while, but I think if the big 3 all "Wii out" this cycle no one will see a compelling reason to upgrade and the whole industry could crash. Mark Rein seems to agree because he's basically been saying the same thing this GDC.

Is Jaffe working at a small studio or is it a Sony owned studio?
I think his opinion would be shared among the smaller companies. Those dont have the financial prowess to make big budget titles, risk and pay for a large human force for projects that take two years to make. These developers are probably in deep shit.
Certainly EA, CryTek, DICE and Epic dont face the same risks. Big and established developers are also more likely to get the financial back up from the big guys too.

 

[hoho]

Perhaps after interviewing enough developers and publishers, Sony and MS came to the conclusion that a watered down nextgen console is what the majority of the development community wants.

That makes no sense at all. The faster the system the less time is needed to make something work on it at half-decent performance.

 

[Ninjaprime]

New gens with bigger budgets are bad for everyone except the giant power studios. Most companies cant afford todays 50 million dollar game budgets, even less can afford tomorrows 100 million dollar game budgets. Those top 5 or so will get bigger and richer, little studios and games will get eaten for CoD XI, GoW4 ect. Look at LA noire, great game, couple million sold, wasn't enough to make it. It will only be worse as spec and game cost goes up. I suppose indies will always make neat $1-10 games for small fun though.

 

[Nesh]

That makes no sense at all. The faster the system the less time is needed to make something work on it at half-decent performance.

Considering that expectations and complexity of games increase with every gen, time is always the same problem, unless we assume that the hardware upgrade is bigger than what the developers are trying to achieve. But we always know that they are trying to hit the ceiling as much as possible with any given hardware.

 

[Ninjaprime]

That makes no sense at all. The faster the system the less time is needed to make something work on it at half-decent performance.

No its makes perfect sense. The less textures, polys, shaders, AI, physics code, ect you have to create for a system with more power, the less it costs you. Lower spec keeps it down for everyone. Few studios can afford a high end game now.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

How about the obvious? Just because a console can reach a certain performance bar, it doesn't mean you have to chase that bleeding edge. Lower spec, lower budget games run fine on the same system, barring exotic hardware choices of course.

Yep. Could also come at a lower price. One price for all games probably is a negative, as it means your cheap-to-make $60 game is going to be up against their expensive AAA $60 and they'll get all the sales, so you'd better invest heavily to match/outdo them in fancyness. It would behoove the console companies to have different license tiers for different price games, I reckon.

No its makes perfect sense. The less textures, polys, shaders, AI, physics code, ect you have to create for a system with more power, the less it costs you. Lower spec keeps it down for everyone. Few studios can afford a high end game now.

Of course, devs don't have to max devices out. And if you're not maxxing it out, the higher performance should make it easier/cheaper to develop for.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Yep. Could also come at a lower price. One price for all games probably is a negative, as it means your cheap-to-make $60 game is going to be up against their expensive AAA $60 and they'll get all the sales, so you'd better invest heavily to match/outdo them in fancyness. It would behoove the console companies to have different license tiers for different price games, I reckon.

Of course, devs don't have to max devices out. And if you're not maxxing it out, the higher performance should make it easier/cheaper to develop for.

Thank you Shifty for sharing this bloody refreshing breath of fresh air! This was exactly my thought too.

Platforms holders all know that going the under-powered route is a quickfast sure-fire route to irrelevance. Both Sony and MS head honchos have been pappin on for a couple of years about extending next-gen's launch to take advantage of new technologies in order to provide a big enough jump in system capabilities to justify the upgrade from PS360 to their next-boxes. It's been made vividly clear that both companies understand this.

A few questionable rumours floating around in a time where every site and their uncle are pulling stuff out their rear-ends to get site hits, should not cause any reasonable person to take to the assumption that MS & Sony are going to "Wii-ify" their next-gen consoles when the companies themselves with their PR comments have clearly indicated otherwise.

So, if MS and Sony know they need to go bleeding edge (or as bleeding edge as they could possibly afford) with their next-gen boxes, whilst still supporting developers, then the only way to do so is to establish with the big publishers a route for mid-tier budget games to thrive, i.e. to be developed, marketed, supported and sold to the consumer at a lower price than the AAAA-big-budget-super-star-stellar-sellers.

Next-gen more then ever will require a full scale industry wide migration to a multi-tiered pricing model for games. Pubs must understand and accept that trying to sell all games for $60 will lead to their inevitable collapse. Sony & MS however can go to some lengths to help pubs come to terms with this by offering more flexible licensing agreements and royalty schemes for games of differing budgetary investment levels.

Additonailly, with full day-one DD support for all games, the console online platforms can be expanded further to allow for even lower cost DD games that could even afford the devs/pubs higher royalty rates, thus promoting the atractiveness of these (used games-free) platforms to smaller developers/pubs.

 

[upnorthsox]

Thank you Shifty for sharing this bloody refreshing breath of fresh air! This was exactly my thought too.

Platforms holders all know that going the under-powered route is a quickfast sure-fire route to irrelevance. Both Sony and MS head honchos have been pappin on for a couple of years about extending next-gen's launch to take advantage of new technologies in order to provide a big enough jump in system capabilities to justify the upgrade from PS360 to their next-boxes. It's been made vividly clear that both companies understand this.

A few questionable rumours floating around in a time where every site and their uncle are pulling stuff out their rear-ends to get site hits, should not cause any reasonable person to take to the assumption that MS & Sony are going to "Wii-ify" their next-gen consoles when the companies themselves with their PR comments have clearly indicated otherwise.

So, if MS and Sony know they need to go bleeding edge (or as bleeding edge as they could possibly afford) with their next-gen boxes, whilst still supporting developers, then the only way to do so is to establish with the big publishers a route for mid-tier budget games to thrive, i.e. to be developed, marketed, supported and sold to the consumer at a lower price than the AAAA-big-budget-super-star-stellar-sellers.

Next-gen more then ever will require a full scale industry wide migration to a multi-tiered pricing model for games. Pubs must understand and accept that trying to sell all games for $60 will lead to their inevitable collapse. Sony & MS however can go to some lengths to help pubs come to terms with this by offering more flexible licensing agreements and royalty schemes for games of differing budgetary investment levels.
Additonailly, with full day-one DD support for all games, the console online platforms can be expanded further to allow for even lower cost DD games that could even afford the devs/pubs higher royalty rates, thus promoting the atractiveness of these (used games-free) platforms to smaller developers/pubs.

I agree with this but it runs contrary to the notion of pushing the leading edge. Less fees = less money for loss leading HW recuperation.

 

[dobwal]

Yep. Could also come at a lower price. One price for all games probably is a negative, as it means your cheap-to-make $60 game is going to be up against their expensive AAA $60 and they'll get all the sales, so you'd better invest heavily to match/outdo them in fancyness. It would behoove the console companies to have different license tiers for different price games, I reckon.

Of course, devs don't have to max devices out. And if you're not maxxing it out, the higher performance should make it easier/cheaper to develop for.

Yep. Agreed. And I think a full on digital distribution model on consoles will change the traditional pricing structure of console titles.

If it weren't for Steam on other digital distribution retailers on the PC, mostly all PC game sales would come from BM stores and you would see a similar restrictive pricing scheme. DD has given the PC market a new life. There is a reason no one is complaining about the ever increasing performance of high end PC gpu cards.

Physical distribution, DVD manufacturing, boxart and other misc costs due to physical game titles don't magically drop to 50% because you selling your title for 50% less than the big boys. Marketing companies don't give you a 50% discount either because you are trying to sell a $30 dollar title. Plus, Im betting that BMs rather stock their shelves with $60 dollar new titles versus $30 dollars new titles due to the margins they'll get from fully priced new titles. I believe BMs are a rather large impediment to a more diverse price range of new titles.

I think the first manufacturer that goes all DD, keeps of 20%-30% sales and is still able to move a healthy amount of consoles will show how outdated the traditional model of consoles game sales have become in this day and age.

The only problem with DD only is that the console market itself has to provide a healthy margin to the retailers. I think one way of solving that problem is too provide a margin slightly better than the retailers currently enjoy on hardware/accessories while restricting all point/console buck card sales to retailers who sell the console and its accessories.

 

[Arwin]

The only problem with DD only is that the console market itself has to provide a healthy margin to the retailers. I think one way of solving that problem is too provide a margin slightly better than the retailers currently enjoy on hardware/accessories while restricting all point/console buck card sales to retailers who sell the console and its accessories.

The Vita, in other words. Or the iPad for that matter, depending on who you talk to.

Next gen consoles don't have to do this however, and I hope they don't. There's no need for a 100GB game to be a DD only title if physical is more convenient for most people. And while I don't expect too many 100GB titles, I hope there will be at least still some.

It doesn't have to be so hard to support both, but I'm fairly confident that from Vita on, all releases will have a DD release at the bare minimum, following the Vita model.

 

[Prophecy2k]

I agree with this but it runs contrary to the notion of pushing the leading edge. Less fees = less money for loss leading HW recuperation.

Not necessarily as those mid-tier games would sell at a lower price and could benefit from that by increased unit sales as they could eventually reach the level of impulse buys (something the bleeding edge AAAA games couldn't until deep discounted loooong after release, and by then most sales revenue would traditionally be absorbed the used games market who would undercut pricing at every turn).

There's also the chance to allow for additional monetisation through DLC and such to bring in additional revenues.

Also, with less games overall competing in the AAAA space, those few AAAA-uber-wonder-hype-excite-games would be able to sweep up more sales (in theory anyway), leading to possibly more revenues for the platform holders as these games would be their high royalty generating bread & butter ;-)

 

[upnorthsox]

Not necessarily as those mid-tier games would sell at a lower price and could benefit from that by increased unit sales as they could eventually reach the level of impulse buys (something the bleeding edge AAAA games couldn't until deep discounted loooong after release, and by then most sales revenue would traditionally be absorbed the used games market who would undercut pricing at every turn).

There's also the chance to allow for additional monetisation through DLC and such to bring in additional revenues.

Also, with less games overall competing in the AAAA space, those few AAAA-uber-wonder-hype-excite-games would be able to sweep up more sales (in theory anyway), leading to possibly more revenues for the platform holders as these games would be their high royalty generating bread & butter ;-)

Good points. I'd amagine it'd be hard for MS/Sony to let go of that money though.

 

[Acert93]

No one says a game cannot be functional and aesthetically pleasing without chasing the high budget / realistic look chalk full of hand painted detail in massively random worlds. Some games, yes, but not all.

As for the more realistic games I would argue a game with a nice art style that already uses normal maps this gen and spends time implementing better lighting & shadowing (hey, maybe much faster consoles will allow simpler, more robust approaches to this problem) and added little things... like grass to cover up the boring terrain textures and low polys ... goes a far way without inflating the budgets horribly.

 

[Arwin]

However counter intuitive as this may seem, I have to imagine that at some point better hardware should make making games easier again, because you have to worry less about performance - mor things you can imagine are within your grasp without requiring countless balancing of assets, memory, clever graphics pipelines and what not. At the same time asset creation should be getting easier and easier as well to the point where if I want a certain phone in my game, I just put it into a 3D scanner.

In the meantime, game designers should just completely let go of thinking that next-gen graphics means your game has to look realistic. Take a leaf out of Nintendo's book - you can make pleasing graphics with a far lower hardware budget than you think.