Any games to get excited about in 2009?

[Arnwyn]

Yeah, but XBox and Wii are still killing PS3 in sales.

I was clearly talking about the "exclusive titles".

 

[Steel_Wind]

Pretty unlikely to ever happen. MS would have to really get lax to match PS3"s laxness. PS3 didn't even give us a price cut this holiday season. They're hanging a bit too much on the whole blue-ray thing, as players are getting pretty cheap now.

The whole concept of exclusive titles has essentially died. It was always a concept that occurred in the past more due to happenstance than by clever design or any real marketing inititative. If you think otherwise, well... for the most part, it just looked that way.

Games simply cost too much to make. As a game developer, the only way to rationally recover your investment is to multi-sku your game across as many platforms as you can afford to implement the game on.

There were exclusive titles earlier in this Next generation batch of titles, but that was principally due to the fact that the PS3's release was delayed. Now? If you can do the game for 360 as well as PS3 - it makes sense to do it that way. For the PC and Wii? Sure - that too if your game concept extends across those hardware brands as well.

That's just good business sense, that's all.

On a separate but closely related topic, our household finally got a PS3 for Xmas this year. We have not even opened it yet though. It's literally still sitting in a box in the living room.

Pretty odd way to treat a major Xmas giftie you say? True enough. The reason for this is because we already have a 360 and my oldest son also got a gaming PC for Xmas as well. So... there has been no pressing need to open it yet. When we do open it, my guess is that its first use will be as a Blu Ray player - not as a game console. But we'll get to that today or tomorrow.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the 360. I think Xbox Live, in particular, is especially well done and my older son enjoys it a lot. But the one thing that annoys me most about our XBox 360 is that it is an original release version model of the system. It's been a trooper, and never a Red Ring of Death to be seen...

But it still sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet when it is on and frankly - that drives me nuts. The sound the thing makes when it is on is pretty hard to tolerate. (Yes, they have improved the design in subsequent models and you can install your game to the drive to improve the sound on even the original release model if you want to reduce the sound issue. But it's a release model, with a 20 gig drive so it makes a lot of noise and there's not a lot of HD space to install to in any event after you take the demands of XBox Live DLC into account.)

So... to return to the topic at hand: if there are simultaneous releases of some major new games this year that we are going to get, due to the WHINING ENGINE sound aspect of the 360 - I am going to give the PS3 version of the game a try first.

And then we'll see if the PS3 is a preferable platform to play it on vs the 360. I am anticipating that there will be no significant difference between the two - other than the noise factor - and that this will favour in the long run my preference for getting games for the PS3 over our particular model of the 360. If I can use a mouse and keyboard on the PS3 version of the game to play it? Then that will definitely mean the PS3 version of the game will out in our home.

And yes, for the record, we have a Wii as well. The 360 (and eventually the PS3) are in the living room - hooked up to a 1080p. The Wii is in the basement hooked up to an old standard Def TV. My three year old plays on it but the rest of the family does not bother with it. Despite its strong sales among casual gamers, that would not describe my family. The Wii has simply been exiled off of our island. The games - and the interest - just isn't there. If there is a cool driving game or other title pitched at a very young player and my youngest son might enjoy it? We'll pick up one or two games for it over the course of the year, but otherwise, the Wii has lost the battle for console dominance in our home.

 

[Felon]

The whole concept of exclusive titles has essentially died. It was always a concept that occurred in the past more due to happenstance than by clever design or any real marketing inititative. If you think otherwise, well... for the most part, it just looked that way.

Don't know where you're getting this intel from. Exclusive titles are often aggressively pursued, at least in Microsoft's case. Mass Effect, Halo, Gears of War, and Fable are franchises they intend to pay to keep. Sony has recently spoken up and said they aren't going in that direction anymore.

Games simply cost too much to make. As a game developer, the only way to rationally recover your investment is to multi-sku your game across as many platforms as you can afford to implement the game on.

Indeed, games cost a lot to make, and they get more expensive when you design for multiple platforms. If a company steps up and offers you a million to design a game just for them, there's a reasonable incentive to take it. The PS3 has something of a rep for being hard to design games for. Saints Row spent a long time in development for the PS3 before they finally gave up and said "forget it--wait for the sequel". MS has the edge in that developing for the PC means you have a good foot in the door to develop for the Xbox.

The main issue with maintaining exclusive titles is saturation. Is it meaningful to be the platform that has an exclusive AAA FPS like Halo when there are so many FPS titles floating around for both consoles? Sales would seem to indicate that the answer is yes. Is it meaningful to have an exclusive suite of RPG's, like Fable and Mass Effect? That's a title MS has sought but can't be so sure of. Can the competitor just make do with the remaining cross-platform games, or will they just cancel out the edge by getting their own exclusive titles? At this point, MS may feel they have sufficient lead to get lazy, or they may want to try to keep forcing Sony to up the ante.

 

[Mallus]

...and they get much more expensive when you design for multiple platforms.

I'm fairly sure that isn't true.

 

[Felon]

I'm fairly sure that isn't true.

/shrug

At some point, it pretty much gets down to "says you". I'm "fairly sure" I'm right, else I wouldn't have said it.

 

[Mallus]

At some point, it pretty much gets down to "says you". I'm "fairly sure" I'm right, else I wouldn't have said it.

I don't do that kind of programming, but... a big part of any software project is design work that's largely hardware-independent, many of the actual in-game assets are, (largely, again) hardware-independent, like the art assets, and really, it's not that hard to get code written for one machine to work on another (though getting it to run well is another story).

Of course multi-platform development adds to your costs, just not as significantly as you're indicating, particularly, which, curiously enough, helps explain the trend towards multi-platform development. If multi-platform development was profitable, why do it? Charity?

There are real game industry people on ENWorld, aren't there? Help me out here. I'm fairly sure (though not certain) that I'm not talking out my *ss.

 

[Umbran]

and really, it's not that hard to get code written for one machine to work on another (though getting it to run well is another story).

First of all, yes, getting code to run cross-platform can be a big issue, depending on what technologies you've used. But, even if it wasn't - you yourself note that getting it to run well is another story. But you can't go shipping a game that doesn't run well. That "other story" is inescapable.

Of course multi-platform development adds to your costs, just not as significantly as you're indicating, particularly, which, curiously enough, helps explain the trend towards multi-platform development. If multi-platform development was profitable, why do it? Charity?

How costly cross-platform development is depends upon the technologies you are using.

Also, note that the question of it being profitable is complicated. For example, there's the question of resources - how many people that you don't currently have will you need to get on the staff? How quickly can you get them, and are they good enough? Can you cover the extra overhead they represent for the short term to reap the long-term costs?...

And, it is not enough to make a profit. You have to make a big enough profit. The bigwigs compare their investments. I can spend $X on cross-platform development, and that'll earn me $Y. I could spend that $X on seventeen other projects, each of which will make some other amount. If that other amount is larger than $Y, I probably don't do the cross-platform development.

If I recall correctly, Macs currently have something like a 10% to 13% share of the overall home computer market, depending whose estimates you read. That means that if you have a windows-app that you want to take cross-platform, if the extra development cost is not less than 10% of your total development costs, it probably isn't economically worth porting.

 

[Felon]

Of course multi-platform development adds to your costs, just not as significantly as you're indicating, particularly, which, curiously enough, helps explain the trend towards multi-platform development. If multi-platform development was profitable, why do it? Charity?

"As significantly as I'm indicating"? My language was pretty vague. Development costs vary. Clearly, those cross-platform development costs are unlikely to be so high as to prohibit profitability. However, if someone is willing to write you a big, fat check to develop a title exclusively for their console, then it's certainly worth consideration. A bird in the hand versus two in the bush.

 

[Pants]

Already happened in 2008, AFAIC.

With what games? MGS4, Little Big Planet, and... there was some other exclusive 'big name' title in 2008, but I can't remember it.

The 2008 'big name' exclusives definitely do close the gap between the X-Box and the PS3, but they haven't eclipsed the 360 yet.

 

[Woas]

Pretty much just Hearts of Iron 3.


I have a very love/hate relationship with video games.