TotalRoundTable: The Generation after That
Peering into the depths of (next year’s?) Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 from a development perspective.
Published: March 30, 2011
Furthermore, look at what Sony is doing with their whole PlayStation Suite side of things. They're actively courting Android publishers to make games that are literal crossovers from the mobile side of things. Apple opened up their whole Game Center initiative recently. What we're seeing isn't a consolidation (well, there is that), but a sort of baseline broadening of the ways of getting content, and with that will come products like Game Dev Story or, to pimp our site, the coolest Minis offering yet that we recently saw, Where Is My Heart? And, just to bridge the whole Minis thing, the Halfbrick guys down in Australia were not only a normal dev studio, but they cranked out some amazing games as XNA projects (now Indie Games) as just one-off concepts that they eventually moved over to the Minis platform and are easily among the best available – and they're dirt cheap.
It's important to consider just how much of a groundswell the indie side of things has these days. Sony allows devs (if approved, and if they can pay for the rather high QA submission fees and bandwidth costs) to self-publish, and if you can shack up with Microsoft, you're an exclusive player on the indie XBLA side. I wish I could speak to Nintendo's treatment of indie devs, but... well, the less said there, the better. But that's a perfect portent to how Nintendo is really embracing the 3DS's ability to wirelessly communicate with things passively; StreetPass, SpotPass, and the NGP's Near are quite actively changing how gaming on the go works. Now, just being somewhere can have an impact on the game you might have paused when traveling your morning commute to the office. That's seriously amazing shit right there. Like, Louis C.K.-level "everything is awesome and nobody's happy" stuff.
As for when it will happen? 2012 for the first rollers, but it probably won't fully kick off until 2013. As for when we'll actually hear about things? The first trickles have already started and they're only going to get nosier as we move into solidified contracts. This is, I believe, the longest gen we've had yet, and that benefits everyone. More time to learn the hardware, more time to recoup costs on the dev side, and more time for the engines to mature. And then, of course, there's the R&D side of things, where the normal Moore's Law stuff (that's starting to morph a little with the whole multi-core side of things) will be eased just a bit. I do think, very much, that the timelines of console hardware will change a little. There's a decided feel of cobbled-together, off-the-shelf-with-improvements building happening now with the latest handhelds, and without Kutaragi around anymore, I don't think Sony is as keen on building as much a proprietary mess anymore. Which is, in a way, a shame, as his EE background really showed as the systems came into their fifth year.
Consider this: the PS2 was a nearly entirely internally developed(ly?) piece of kit – from start to finish. Even now, with all the advances we've made, that system produces fill rates that are absolutely nutsfor the hardware at the time. Utterly insane. It's also why the PS3 can't reproduce them. That was EE magic. And, in a way, it's gone. Possibly forever, considering how much Sony has changed. Nintendo will always go for margins on hardware, Microsoft will always go for a superior software experience, and Sony... well, we'll see how Sony does now. The NGP is arguably the most important combination of engineering, budgeting, and overwhelming consideration for dev feedback since the original PlayStation.
It's important to consider just how much of a groundswell the indie side of things has these days. Sony allows devs (if approved, and if they can pay for the rather high QA submission fees and bandwidth costs) to self-publish, and if you can shack up with Microsoft, you're an exclusive player on the indie XBLA side. I wish I could speak to Nintendo's treatment of indie devs, but... well, the less said there, the better. But that's a perfect portent to how Nintendo is really embracing the 3DS's ability to wirelessly communicate with things passively; StreetPass, SpotPass, and the NGP's Near are quite actively changing how gaming on the go works. Now, just being somewhere can have an impact on the game you might have paused when traveling your morning commute to the office. That's seriously amazing shit right there. Like, Louis C.K.-level "everything is awesome and nobody's happy" stuff.
As for when it will happen? 2012 for the first rollers, but it probably won't fully kick off until 2013. As for when we'll actually hear about things? The first trickles have already started and they're only going to get nosier as we move into solidified contracts. This is, I believe, the longest gen we've had yet, and that benefits everyone. More time to learn the hardware, more time to recoup costs on the dev side, and more time for the engines to mature. And then, of course, there's the R&D side of things, where the normal Moore's Law stuff (that's starting to morph a little with the whole multi-core side of things) will be eased just a bit. I do think, very much, that the timelines of console hardware will change a little. There's a decided feel of cobbled-together, off-the-shelf-with-improvements building happening now with the latest handhelds, and without Kutaragi around anymore, I don't think Sony is as keen on building as much a proprietary mess anymore. Which is, in a way, a shame, as his EE background really showed as the systems came into their fifth year.
Consider this: the PS2 was a nearly entirely internally developed(ly?) piece of kit – from start to finish. Even now, with all the advances we've made, that system produces fill rates that are absolutely nutsfor the hardware at the time. Utterly insane. It's also why the PS3 can't reproduce them. That was EE magic. And, in a way, it's gone. Possibly forever, considering how much Sony has changed. Nintendo will always go for margins on hardware, Microsoft will always go for a superior software experience, and Sony... well, we'll see how Sony does now. The NGP is arguably the most important combination of engineering, budgeting, and overwhelming consideration for dev feedback since the original PlayStation.
