Insomniac to go cross platform?

obonicus said:
Point developers who've worked for exclusives and are thriving.
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I think I already mentioned Epic Games, a third party, doing a 360 exclusive, owns the IP to Gears of War - low cost development, high return. Valve is another one, for years, have worked on this philosophy. Bioware. What's their biggest IP? Mass Effect! Bigger than Dragon Age, will end twice the revenue, you can't get that on Ps3. Then, of course, there's Insomniac.
 
Carl B said:
I have to say, I think you're selling Insomniac short here. For all intents and purposes they are one of Sony's "tech divisions," taking part in all the cross-studio tech sharing that has been of note thus far; with ICE, Guerilla, Naughty Dog, and the other first parties. IMO they are in fact the closest thing to a first party you can have without actually being one (up until now, hypothetically, of course).

The yearly release schedule is, frankly, impressive; half the titles sold across the same employee pool at twice the rate of titles released would IMO be a wash. But obviously the thinking (so far as I would imagine in the context of this rumor) would be the relative ease to port to 360 with what is already a technology platform that lends itself to some abstraction while remaining data centric. I don't know whether this rumor is true or not - and I would like to think not myself - but I would understand either way.

As for "blaming the environment," I mean personally I think it is perfectly legitimate to have pointed out the 60fps dichotomy for example. How would they match games like Uncharted 2, if they are opting to push frames instead of effects? I sympathize with the frustrations.
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Honestly if Insomniac are sharing tech with other studios I can't see it in other first/second party games. Every other game, bar SOCOM: Confrontation, published by Sony has a very good level of polish compared to Resistance 2 (which is the game which started all of this) and it shows.

I don't feel like I'm selling them short, I feel like they sell themselves short with their lack of polish and poor story telling. R2 was sooo close to being an awesome game but it failed in critical areas so the game didn't do well critically or commercially. The same goes for Killzone 2, but that was a different type of failure and it is quite clear that GG are tech wizards and K2 is pretty amazing in the tech department.

Insomniac failed with tech in R2, there is no doubt about it.

The people that care about 60fps are on GAF, most people don't give a crap. James Stevenson spends a lot of time on GAF and thinks that is how all fans think about gaming. It isn't true, with good motion blur and V-Sync most gamers wouldn't notice the drop from 60 -> 30fps. I mean the people talking crap about Insomniac when they say 60fps isn't going to be a priority going forwards are the same ones saying Naughty Dog and GG are best first/second party developers and tech Gods.

Sticking to the 1 game a year schedule is clearly the root cause of all this, they aren't capable of delivering highly polished games once year with the current development schedule. Well not games with the scope of R2 at least, and if they want to be successful on the scale of other first/third party developers then it is clear that they have to spend more time polishing and move to a longer development/pre-production time.

It's just my thoughts on it, I'm sure people will say I'm completely wrong, but I love Insomniac games and some of the best experiences I had on PS3 were in R1 and on PS2 were in R&C. I think ignoring the obvious problems they have and burying our collective heads in the sand does them more of a disservice than providing criticism. Going multi-platform won't solve their issues, more likely it will compound them.
 
NathansFortune said:
Honestly if Insomniac are sharing tech with other studios I can't see it in other first/second party games.
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You can't see it ! But you can read about it:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5545&page=2

Correcting some of the problems that were present in the first Uncharted and solving new problems that arose during development of Uncharted 2 did not completely rest on the shoulders of Naughty Dog.

Developers of Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet and Ratchet and Clank lended a hand to the Naughty Dog crew. "We're very fortunate to have a great relationship with many of the talented first and second party developers making games for the PlayStation 3," says Evan Wells. "Studios like Guerrilla Games, Insomniac and Santa Monica Studios were great sounding boards for technical advice. Specifically Guerrilla and Insomniac helped us eliminate the screen tearing that was present in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.
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Calling R2 a failure is probably too harsh. It could be better, yes. It's not a bad/lousy game.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
You can't take a best performer as a realistic standard. Because MW can sell 20 million, every developer making an FPS should be aiming for 20 million sales and it's their fault if they don't get it. There are no sure-fire recipes for success. And if you don't have a console company bankrolling your creations whether they succeed or flop, there's added pressure to maximise profits. Going cross-platform could be 50% more sales, which will be multiple times more profit. The only reason not to is if in focussing on one platform, you can create a better title that's more competitve and attracts more buyers as a result. There's no guaranteed way to do that though, with exclusives failing to sell across platforms. Thus hedging bets makes considerable sense.

Putting it another way, what could Insomniac do different? Have they developed the wrong games to prevent 5 million+ sales per title? Did they not create good enough games? If you were placed in charge of Insomniac tomorrow, what changes would you invoke to remain PS3 exclusive yet increase sales of titles?
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I pointed out Uncharted 2 because it shows what is possible, not what is the norm. Clearly I don't expect all games to do that well, but ND went from a similar position Insomniac were in from PS2 and they are now considered a premier developer on the same level as Bungie or Valve.

The changes I would make would be to scrap the 1 game a year schedule, bring in ICE and SCE Cambridge, get all the outside help they need to get up to speed with PS3 development as it is clear they have fallen behind the curve as Uncharted 2 and FFXIII show. R&C is out, or at least shipped out to another developer to make PSP/PSN titles, do an adult themed platformer or a new genre entirely. The PS3 userbase has grown up since the PS2 days and R&C, while solid games, don't cut it anymore, it shows in the sales figures. R3 should go back to the roots of the game forget R2 even existed and go back to being bleak and unforgiving. Lose the 60fps focus, it restricts everything too much.

But like you point out Insomniac have SCE bankrolling their development and it doesn't look like that will change any time soon.

Again, this is just my silly opinion and I'm sure the more esteemed users will poke many a hole in them! :D
 
NathansFortune said:
Lose the 60fps focus, it restricts everything too much.

But like you point out Insomniac have SCE bankrolling their development and it doesn't look like that will change any time soon.
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A R&C game in 30 fps? Ugh, no thanks. I am also not sure I agree about R&C or R2 being less cutting-edge than what other developers have shown, nor if better graphics would have resulted in better sales. R&C's main problem I see is that the audience is slowly growing out of their games or that that kind of market is shrinking. If they want to go after the block-buster crowd, then U2 is perhaps the way to go like Naughty Dog demonstrated. I'd rather they go after that with the Resistance franchise though and keep R&C family friendly as solid platformers like that are unfortunately dying.
 
Yeah, I think Incomniacs tech for R2 is a bit underestimated. The framerate is really solid no matter what happens on screen. It almost never skips a beat even in the largest firefights with alot of characters and effects on screen. There's also no screan tearing as far as I know. Then there's the good water effects and their net code is still among the best, it never lags and they have a very quick matchmaking.
 
Mr. Domino said:
Yeah, I think Incomniacs tech for R2 is a bit underestimated. The framerate is really solid no matter what happens on screen. It almost never skips a beat even in the largest firefights with alot of characters and effects on screen. There's also no screan tearing as far as I know. Then there's the good water effects and their net code is still among the best, it never lags and they have a very quick matchmaking.
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Very true, Insomniac's tech for R&C and R2 was sufficient given the time when these games were able to be finished and released at retail.

I mean do you honestly think now that Killzone 2, and Uncharted 2 development tools were complete that Insomniac is still going to be using their old "mostly relying on the GPU to render" tech for their next games?

Thats why Insomniac has been able to release a game since launch and every year after and please remember when screenshots of R2 first appeared on the interwebs people kept saying that those graphics were just not possible.
 
NathansFortune said:
Insomniac failed with tech in R2, there is no doubt about it.
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I don't support this at all! The game tech was *at least* solid. I don't understand what all this "not so polished" stuff means. Framerate was solid, a good looking title with lots of action and large scale.

But regarding the tech: read something about their water tech. I was quite impressed by this, as they are using quite high standard simulation techniques for this....we use very similar algorithms here to simulate for instance fluid dynamics.

I also suppose that the water tech is not so easy replicated on other platforms (including PC), as they are using a FFT. And I know from talks and presentation that a well optimized FFT on CELL is ultra fast, especially compared to standard CPUs such as Xeons and Nehalems...
 
Yep, they're going to do a new IP set in a new universe with EA that's multi-platform. Very interesting to see whether this means Resistance 3 is coming this year, or not at all. It's a deal not unlike Bungie's recent deal, it seems, with retaining IP rights.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/insomniac-signs-multiformat-ea-deal

EDIT: They're continuing to do exclusive titles for Sony, but branching out now with a multi-platform title / IP for EA. One thing they're citing is that they want to be able to put more time into their titles. Adding one plus one gives me the impression that they are working to making themselves bigger.
 
I am more interested in what IP they have selected after soliciting our feedback months ago.

[size=-2]Anyone doing a Hayao Miyazaki game on PS3 ?[/size]
 
Hm, what i think is interesting:

fans scream: Insomniac should take more time to polish
my opinion: games are polished as hell with unmatchable content
Insomniac: we notice that we need more time to make a game
:cry:

on the other hand: We go MP with some of our future projects
my opinion: doesn't MP dev automatically means less time for the individual versions, less time to polish?
...this does not sounds extremely logic to me!

But, who the heck cares...I liked the every-year-a-title rythm, had much fun with Insomniac games (bought them all) and I am 100% positive that I will have much fun with their future games!!
 
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