Devil May Cry 4 Going Multi-platform! (Xbox 360/PS3/PC) *Confirmed

Well, those goals were not concurrent though; the drive to reach profitability by the end of this coming fiscal year was instituted after the former claim was obviously buried in terms of reality. Basically I think the initial launch-year plan has been deemed to be unrealistic internally and the attention is being shifted away from 'letting it roll' assuming brisk sales to an active management of what is going to be a somewhat rough-ish year (or at least appears to be so far), with an eye being kept squarely on costs and expenses now relative to income.

 

Just imagine how much more expensive dev costs could get if you spend 50 GB of data on it.

not saying it could not happen just that it will take time (several iterations of a game perhaps) to build up those assets.

 

"After"? I was under the impression Sony's financial goals were made at or around the launch. Prior to January/February NPD and Japan sales data.

I still do not see how, with the way things are going currently, Sony's Playstation division can turn a profit in the next few years, let alone next year.

IMO:
The current losses + continued losses after price drop(s) + sluggish HW sales (limiting SW sales) + low attach rates = RED ink.

I know they will be introducing 65nm and other cost savings in the near future and beyond, but these will only counter balance the price drops necessary to keep PS3 selling.

 

Investing in PS3 specific PQ improvements in cross platform games could prove to be very wasteful. How does one handle such investment? On a game by game basis? How do you stipulate and enforce that no PS3 specific work be ported to other platforms if those improvements proved to be beneficial to the dev's technology as a whole? How do you stop MS from providing equal investments to insure visual parity?

MS and Sony paid for platform specific content in GTA and effectively cancelled out the benefit of investing in a model of additional content through compensation.

The PS2 outsold the Xbox with a higher price and inferior graphics. Most people attribute this phenomenom to the PS2 game library. If a cheaper price with superior graphics didn't help the Xbox what makes you think superior graphics and a higher price will help the PS3 to the point of making model of hoarding exclusives moot. No one game is going to lead a console manufacturer to market dominance, but each quality games acts as a catalyst to better sales. Exclusiveness multiplies the effect of such a phenemenom. Games such as Blue Dragon, Gundam Musou, Monster Hunter has all shown to cause a temporary spike in japanese sales of their respective consoles. Each isolated incident may seem inconsequential but when looking situation as a whole, one will notice the culminative effect that individual exclusive games as a whole have on console sales.

 

I completely agree the PS2s short comings had no effect at all. If the 360 becomes the default lead platform for 3rd party games which are going to out number first party and exclusives by atleast by at least by 10 times. I don't think anyone will care the PS3 has some cool effects on a handfull of games every year when every other game is pretty much the same thanks to the 360 being the lead platform. It happened last generation no one cared the xbox could do incredible stuff like halo when every other game was a wash because of the PS2 being the lead platform.


If the PS3 launched at 299/399 with out a blue ray drive IMO it would be wiping the floor with everyone but nintendo in japan.

 

When Sony says they are looking to be 'profitable' by the end of next year, they are not talking about black for the entire gen, they are talking about from an operations standpoint. Obviously making back the initial $2 billion+ will take years. But, again, that is not what they are talking about. And I think their goal is something quite plausible. Not to say probable, but plausible.

 

That longer period is one month.

 

I expect there will be progress within that field as within any other field, productivity will rise with the right tool support.

Maybe this is a field (capturing real world environments), that Sony is giving some priority, they did some ground breaking work with the original Getaway. They probably have done some progress since then.

 

Well, wasn't the original question "if you saw a PS3 game and a 360 game, could you tell them apart?" I imagine seeing far fewer units will very quickly separate the 360 game from the PS3 game.

RE4 was scaled back in graphics, not in gameplay. This could very well separate the games out.

 

This idea assumes the SPE's can be leveraged to superior effect. ie. PS3 is capable of more overall than XB360 and the thing holding it back is development. If that's true, and Sony can provide software tools to enable use of the superior tech, all titles using those tools will look superior on PS3 and there'll be nothing MS can do to compensate, as they'll be hardware limited. eg. In one game XB360 uses a particle based fire effect, where on PS3 it uses a Sony developed plugin fluid-dynamic simulated fire effect that's much more realistic. At no extra effort to the devs, PS3 gets a visual advantage.

As for MS providing tools and 'equal investments', that'd require them to develop a cross-platform engine themselves that runs on SPEs, and to compete with Sony in reaching the devs. Presumably they'd not use the SPE's at all effectively, so it'd be quite a choice for devs to choose an MS cross-platform engine knowing it's bypassing PS3's key technology. As to whether Sony's PSSG effort works well with non-Sony hardware, we'll have to see. If it runs great on PS3 but like a turkey on other platforms, it won't be embraced. That said, DIRT shows good results on XB360, so at this point in time it looks like Sony are offering cross-platform tools that'll make developing for their platform easier and leverage it's strengths. That'll also be out now. MS would have to rush out some product quick if they want to tackle this strategy head-on. And regardless if MS do that, it's still the best way for Sony to spend their dollars. Out of the options

1) Buy 3rd party exclusives
2) Pay for 1st party exclusives
3) Create dev-friendly tools
4) Advertise!

Options 3 gives by far and away the largest return on investment, with the smallest cost and the widest-reaching benefits.

 

Agreed, we are not talking about the billions in R&D, just turning a profit on a current quarter. I don't see this happening this year or next based on my previous post points.

PS3 yearly BOM reductions ~ PS3 yearly msrp reductions

IMO

I don't have hard numbers but the machine is obviously expensive and obviously needs price reduction(s) asap.

 

If you see them side-by-side? Or in an internet movie one day, and round a friend's house 3 weeks later? Unless you're deliberately comparing them, the particulars get forgetten and all people remember are the general look. Like people saying Motorstorm looks like the E3 trailer. Overall, it does, but in particulars it doesn't. If PS3 Motorstorm looked like the E3 trailer, and XB360 Motorstorm looked like the current PS3 game, to many a gamer they wouldn't notice the difference - certainly not enough to choose a platform over. Some things might stand out though, like Fight Night's pixelated crowds on PS3. Even if it has better lighting and shading, those crowds are bound to get noticed and stick in people's memory as 'I'm sure those crowds didn't look that bad when I saw this on John's XB360'. People notice and remember wrongs more often than rights. As artists in different fields say, especially CG, often when you do something right, you know it's right because people don't notice it!

 

I think people will notice if the box says "2 players max" or has half the number of maps, or the unit limit is set at 200 instead of 1000 (all hypothetical numbers of course). I would definitely notice it if it was an RTS at the very least.

 

I agree Shifty ( great post btw)

But shouldn't this have been priority #1 a few years ago? A bit late now isn't it?

It's funny because it seems Sony truly believes the PR they spit out there: "Nextgen starts when we say so" etc.

These guys should have been refining these tool sets at this point. It's not like Cell was just wrapped up a month ago. The chip has been finished for what, 2-3 years? I don't know, it just seems like I said ... like they truly believe their press clippings and pr spin.

I still think Dobwal has a good point regarding last gen ps2 vs xbox sales. I don't see a slight advantage being good enough to sway enough sales to get them out of third place this gen, given the higher price point and smaller library.

 

Nearly all the PS3 (upcoming) exclusives seem to be around 20GB or more. I think we'll see 50GB games pretty easily.

EDIT: Correction

 

I don't see anyone having close to 50 gigs of real content. Sure they could fill it up with mpeg2 compress HD videos and uncompressed sound.

 

...

I was tempted to in depth reply but I'll save it and just say:

Really... Link?

 

How do you know they weren't? How long does it take to create a cross-platform graphics engine for a console you haven't made? Or to create certain tools? They didn't totally ignore tools and development as evidenced by various acquisitions and partnerships, such as buying SN Systems. the latest offerings are great improvements, but that's not to say there was nothing before these. All development is incremental.

I think your hatred of Sony PR clouds your mind somewhat. Just because a few big-mouthed PR figureheads spout nonsense, doesn't mean the entire corporation is inept and setting it's plans on those PR-fuelled opinions.

Do you believe Sony really thought they'd sell consoles without providing tools and software, and had all their software engineers sitting around twiddling their thumbs for the past three years? IMO you're underestimating what it takes to develop large-scale tools and software applications. It can take years. XB360 had important libraries and features appear well after it's release. That's why you get devkit revisions etc.

Whatever comments some PR chaps have spouted, somewhere in Sony you can be sure there were engineers working on applications on some form or other, creating an OS, libraries, improving tools, researching techniques, and such. We've had a couple of years hearing about initiatives and approaches for developer friendliness. They chose a developer friendly GPU solution, created a developer friendly graphics lib (PSGL), started an open-source graphics interchange format (Collada) etc. They didn't just sit back and do sod all, expecting to sell hardware without any effort on the software side. the fact that tools are improving shows a commitment to improving the situation, and not a start from nothing.

 

Agreed, and obviuosly it isn't the case that they just now started working on it. However, they're words and their actions do seem to link up pretty well, dontcha think?

Plus I guess it does lend some credibility to MS saying the software side of things behind the scenes will be the difference maker this gen and speaking to the difficulties of matching their efforts thus far.



Regarding my hate for Sony PR: indeed.

 

Your idea discounts the effect of lead platform and lack of incentive of devs to invest in the extra time in platform specific enhancements for a cross platform game without the benefit of delayed release. Producing better PQ on the Xbox and GC versus PS2 was relatively easy as it was evident from day one yet numerous cross platform titles did little to expound the greater capacity of the technology presented by the xbox or the GC. There were popular cross platform games that showed little to no visual improvement when comparing a PS2 game to an Xbox or GC game.

If the current conditions showed a visual disparity between the 360 and the PS3, then that would warrant extra investment as PS3 cross-platform games would have to compete with PS3 exclusive games on a visual basis. However, those condition don't exist and even though heavily invested platform specific games such as HS, F13, Liar and MGS show wonderful graphics they don't show a big enough visual disparity to prove the PS3 technical superiority. Its hard to imagine that cross platform titles would spear head such a movement even with better tools.

That doesn't seem to make sense. A good cross platform engine will never totally maximize the strength of one individual platform. Sacrifices have to be made somewhere if one is to make an engine thats conducive to all platforms that have different technical philosophy. If Dirt performs well on the 360 in comparsion to the PS3 version then either PS3 Dirt doesn't make full use of the SPEs or the SPEs don't provide the type of performance one would expect as one would expect that being the lead platform automatically and inherently would give an edge in terms of quality to the PS3 version.

1 and 2 provides the most benefit as historically that has always been true. Give all the exclusive PS2 titles to the xbox and give the PS2 an edge in quality in terms of cross platform games and I doubt that the PS2 would have been the market leader.