PS3 to be dominant in 3 – 5 years, says Reeves

I don’t think the ps3 will pull a dreamcast but i find it hard to believe, it will ever catch the wii.

I think he’s refering to the the HD console market.

In 5 years?

I’ll hopefully be playing on the 3rd xbox by then.
Poor, poor Sony.

The Wii has shot it’s bolt, though. It sold very well very quickly. It’s sales will only level out from here. And if there is a Wii2, will the casual market who so rapidly embraced it do so again for more of the same?

The 360 owns this gen for the core gamer.

3rd Xbox Lutz?

[insert obvious RROD troll comment here]

The older the PS3 becomes, the cheaper it costs to produce and the price differential between it and the 360 will become less of an issue. I can also see the machine evolving into a hell of an all-in-one media box – something the 360 will have trouble matching.

How far they have fallen in such a short space of time. By the time they’re dominating this gen, the next gen Nintendo and MS machines will be on shelves.

SONY have always covered their back by saying the machine will be have a ten year life span. The next XBOX will have a hard time convincing those who’ve had to replace it, some of you more than once, not to get a PS3 that will probably be cheaper if not competitive in price.

Three to five years is a long time. Shouldn’t they be aiming to do stuff to make it dominant… er… now?

sony…seriously…when will you redesign that shitty controller????….then you can tell me something about leading the game….

Blerk, I think the point is that you can’t change things overnight.

And if the 720 once again moves the technology up, I really don’t know how publishers will be able to handle that amount of risk, unless all we get is Call of Duty.

The point is there really ISN’T a reason for console manufacturers to move to another piece of more technologically advanced piece of hardware this generation, becuase things are risky enough now for the hardcore market.

I reckon that in 3-5 years the hardware in the PS3 will be just as releavnt as it is now, becuase publishers can’t AFFORD to make the games to get any better, without purely making it higher resoultion.

“I reckon that in 3-5 years the hardware in the PS3 will be just as releavnt as it is now, becuase publishers can’t AFFORD to make the games to get any better, without purely making it higher resoultion.”

You shouldn’t make such wild assumptions PUD, it just makes you look silly.

What’s to say that in 3-5 years the hardware in the 360 won’t be just as relevant as it is now too?

Pud: Does that really matter? We’ve already jumped over the HD hurdle (ok, stumbled over it)… so hopefully next gen we’ll see people just using the tech without obsessing about how to hit the damn resolution.

We’re certainly not going to be getting a resolution upgrade past 1080p anyway. I appreciate that’s only part of the problem… but given devs are working on PC games anyway I don’t really see much difference. That said, I don’t really care if games get any better looking than Crysis / Gears / Killzone so maybe I’m in the minority here.

Blerk, the PS3 is in question, I wasn’t saying the 360 won’t be equally as relevant.

I was actually responding to those with the assumption that the PS3 won’t matter when the 720 is out. They are all assuming that there will be a technological upgrade – which will make the PS3 irrelevant.

@Psychotext, the resolution is the easy part with a technology upgrade! It’s the asset creation and other engine complexities/details that along with another technological upgrade would bring MANY financial hurdles as well as technical ones.

@G1GA What are you even talking about? Games cost $20 million adverage, last gen they cost $5 million average. Next generation with even more complex engines and assets suddenly that budget will be massive. It’s not an assumption, it’s fact! Technological upgrade costs money.

Games cost $20 million adverage,

No they don’t. Only the high end, triple A, Halo3/KZ2 stuff costs that much. Your “average” game costs a lot less.

Lutz, I didn’t just pick that number out of my arse, it’s something that I remembered specifically becuase it’s VERY relevant in discussions about future generations of consoles.

Why wouldn’t the 360 be equally relevant? You’re assuming that Microsoft will have launched a 720 in 3-5 years and Sony won’t have launched a PS4. Who’s to say that would even happen?

Times are hard, money’s tight, the 360′s on top of the HD pile – Microsoft’s next-gen machine might be further away than you’re assuming.

god this made me laugh!

Blerk, AS I SAID, it could be equally as relevant.

I did not assume, I was just responding to those who did assume that the 720 would be out in the next 3-5 years.

Do you see where I am coming from now?

Puding: So, have you got any proof that the average game costs $20million?

Middle column at the bottom Yoshida says about PS2 games:

“we used to spend between five and ten million dollars per title”

In comaprison to PS3 games:

“The industry is spending 20 to 30 million dollars [per game], and sometimes even more.”

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/1919/averageq.jpg

lol. The scope of the project is more often than not, set by the ones developing it PUD.

It’s not an exponential equation.

In general, the cost of any games’ development is set by the expected return. So if you expect to make £30m from a game, you can spend £20m making it.

As the games industry develops, people are able to make bigger profits, and therefor have bigger budgets. Don’t forget that Halo 3, AFAIK, still has the record for the biggest grossing entertainment release. Computer games didn’t always use to have such mass appeal. So as sales go up and the industry expands, so do budgets.

It’s nothing to do with needing more people and more equipment to make use of the hardware. Just look at LBP.

But with the introduction of Wii and the high entry price of the HD generation of consoles, many have been lost in translation.

There is not the same kind of userbase scale as the PS2 had, and where there is, hardcore titles AREN’T selling. You can spout as much as you want about sales, but a lot of that is down to amrketing which will add up to quite a percentage of your development budget.

Pud, there’s no way that’s the average. Those are the sorts of costs for AAA titles… and they certainly aren’t in the majority.

Also, if resolution doesn’t really make much of a difference, why the specific hike in costs this gen? It doesn’t really make sense to me.

The next hardware generation, whenever it manifests is going to be a lot more like GameCube -> Wii than before. It was just too painful in terms of costs for everyone this time round.

These days many games struggle to render natively at 720p. If they can get to a position where they can launch a box where 1080p @ 60 frames a second is achievable, throw in a tonne of extra cores, more RAM, built in Wi-Fi and flash storage then that is really all we’re going to need.

The hardware of current consoles is 3 years old so something like the above is perfectly feasible now. The good thing will be by the time the industry is ready for it, it’ll be much cheaper.

It’s not the resolution, you can render something in a higher resolution with extra power easily.

It’s just that with the extra technology comes extra detail. And the exclusion of that detail becomes really apparent when the resolution and image quality is improved, and not only that but with the introduction of new hardware, comes the perception of improvement aesthetically.

So animation, the polygon counts of models and the texture resolutions as well as all of the extra different texture effects, which themselves are all textures – they all become more detailed, more time and resource consuming and therefore more expensive.

Did you see the link I posted? He words it, as if it’s an industry standard, why is there any reason for him to lie or bend the truth?

“Also, if resolution doesn’t really make much of a difference, why the specific hike in costs this gen? It doesn’t really make sense to me.”

@Psychotext: Are you saying that resolution is the only difference between this generation and the previous one?

Just by the way, what deftangel is talking about, is not what I am talking about.

I am purely talking about the cost of next (as opposed to current) gen games, in relation to the userbase of hardcore hardware.

PS2 only reached the numbers it did, becuase of the casual effect.

Meeting consumer expectation in today’s market costs a lot PT.

For example: we’ve all seen games marked down if they DON’T have a co-op mode. So a co-op mode needs to be produced to meet expectation. That costs money.

In fact, people are prepared to mark a product down for lacking a feature even if they don’t care for that feature themselves – they’ll still criticise its absence.

—

Given the projected recovery period for the current economic climate and the stupendous costs in developing and launching a new console it makes the most sense to get as much mileage from the one(s) you currently have.

Chasing some technological dream isn’t the most important thing. Games can still be fun regardless of the resolution they’re played in. The people that throw a fit over lack of AA or screen resolutions are by far in the minority. The current generation of machines, unlike previous ones, has shown expandability through firmware updates. New features, new interfaces, new content. It is far more cost-effective to push updates this way than by introducing new hardware.

On top of that, as much fun as it can be to be the first one out of the gate, fracturing the technological standard of a generation is extremely harmful. For most console generations, hardware performance has been roughly level. The current generation sees two very distinct levels of performance between HD and non-HD consoles. That’s extremely costly and time consuming for the industry at large to accomodate even with the minority side of the ‘split’ being at the cheaper, lower-technology side of things. Another split at the more expensive, high-technology side of things would be an impossibly hard sell (remember how fond folk were of dismissing reasons for why developers should bother to develop on PS3 due to its steep technological learning curve and subsequent costs?) If a third technological standard was introduced I would expect only the smallest fraction of non-first party developers to gravitate towards it. Ubisoft will whore themselves shamelessly onto it, of course, but that’s what they do.

The recent ‘HD format war’ only really had two contenders in it and was relatively brief. HD-DVD threw in its towel fairly early on and cut its losses. Games consoles have two technological standards, introducing a third would be an extremely risky proposition.

Yeah, I had not even gone into feature set.

I was just imagining bread and butter CoD4, with better graphics.

I wasn’t specifically replying to any other comments Absolutely, the art generation costs are what have increased massively. I think that’s why Unreal Engine 3 took off the way it did because it made a big play on enabling these massive art teams to crack on straight away generating the assets.

The amount of detail in GTA:IV cost a staggering amount of money. That’s why the next generation will only have a relatively incremental jump in graphical fidelity because there is no way anyone can afford to sell games with double the art team sizes they are using now.

The only real complication to that I see is 3D but the take up of 3DTV’s is going to be positively glacial compared to that of HD so I’m not sure how much headroom the console vendors will leave in to account for it.

Completely agree!

Next generation, if it were to move up again, I imagine that consoles would need to come with a proprietary engine as user-friendly as UE3, and access to an asset library.

Of course making our games even less individual. Lose lose situation next generation.

Seems my mistake is thinking of increased texture quality, polygon count, AA etc required for HD graphics under the whole “resolution” umbrella.

As for the other thing Pud, I still don’t see how that can be the average when we’ve only seen evidence of a few games with those sort of budgets this gen. I’d like to see something a little more solid than a throwaway line in an interview.

In fact, people are prepared to mark a product down for lacking a feature even if they don’t care for that feature themselves – they’ll still criticise its absence.

Yeah, but only proves the old adage of “people are dickheads”

Marking a game down for a feature that it doesn’t have that you don’t care about?

Do me a favour.

Psychotext, the guy that is in charge of all first party development for Sony. A company with a lot of development teams and developments, ranging from high budget to low budget. How would he not be one of the most reliable sources to listen to?

As for resolution, resolution really is to do with one thing: the amount of pixels which are output. And I mentioned AA, and general image quality, with resolution. Not asset quality.

That’s where I made the distinction. AA and resolution are all more mathematical stats in development. They are universally recognised. And AAgoes hand in ahdn with resolution spcifically, as AA is all about downscaling.

The asset creation and detail of those assets are artistic-creative processes. That is ofcourse where the money is sunk, and why I didn’t class it with resolution.

Well there was the theory that Microsoft would buy Epic for just that reason…and Sony themselves give away a free engine, though I don’t think it’s anything like as featured.

The mitigating factor for asset creation is all this stuff around procedural generation of textures / content etc. All the rage a couple of years ago but beyond the odd example (Roboblitz) its very quiet on that front now.

“So animation, the polygon counts of models and the texture resolutions as well as all of the extra different texture effects, which themselves are all textures – they all become more detailed, more time and resource consuming and therefore more expensive.”

This isn’t the case at all PUD.

You’ll find that most, if not all 3d artists make their textures at a higher res than is needed and then reduce the resolution. So reducing a texture from 826×410 down to 512×512 is certainly no more time consuming than reducing it down to 128×128. In fact, as an artist, it’s a whole lot easier to work at the larger sizes. You’ll also find that since the days of the PS1, a great deal of development time needed to be spent optimising and reducing textures just to help framerate and get games running smoothly.

The reality is that the more powerful the hardware, the lazier you can be in terms of optimisation.

So basically, the detail in the visual side of the game has little to no bearing on the cost of the overall project. This obviously changes if you decide to build a bigger world and to put more in it, but that would be the devs decision, and not a necessity of the hardware. Another factoer here is the companies’ pay structure.

Some companies will pay a whole load of grads the minimum wage to come up with a GTA sized world. This is going to be cheaper than paying experienced artists a competitive wage to come up with the same thing.

There are masses of factors that determine the increases in development costs over the past few years, but the newer technology isn’t really one of them.

Pud: Because it’s a throwaway line. Besides, when we’ve actually got some real figures for PS2 game averages ($877k from a sample of 194 games), it’s hard to take his last gen estimates seriously either.

Either that or Sony spends 5x more than anyone else on average for their first party titles. Possible I suppose.

And how amny of 194 games, were what the Wii has, as shovelware?

I expect quite a few.

I am sure he meant a proper game, and sicne the hardcore is all that exists this generation, I ahve no trouble believing that.

@G1Ga No offence mate, but that isshockingly wrong. Unless you are going to create a shitty PS2 high resolution port, then it’s just not the case. And texture resolution is only downsized like that when it’s sampled from a photo. Many textures artists do theirs by ahnd, becuase photographic textures look awful this generation. So most textures and UV maps are hand painted.

And even if you disregard ALL of that, my point about other assets are still undeniable.

Newer technology is the ONLY reason games become more expensive to make, but only when you want to live up the hardwares potential.

That’s the point though… every game contributes to the average. Which is why I said earlier that it could be the average for AAA titles, but there’s no way it’s the average for HD games this gen on the whole.

95% of publishers would have gone bankrupt already.

PUD, I am a 3d artist and textures are what I specialise in, so I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been making them almost every working day for about the last 8 years, so trust me on this one.

“photographic textures look awful this generation. So most textures and UV maps are hand painted.”

Look awful?

I think you’ll find that other than games such as Fable II (a game with a cartoony style), whose textures are actually hand made by incredibly talented artists, most, if not all in-game textures are built from actual photos, and edited in Photoshop or a similar app.

As for UV maps, then they are just a set of co-ordinates, and not even painted at all!

On the current hardware, no, not every game should contribute to the average, if you’re trying to draw a fair parallel.

Becuase the HD userbase isn’t big enough, or aimed at a broad enough demographic, to take into account the casual and shovelware titles that were on the PS2. And there aren’t any HD shovelware titles.

Either way, pretty much every single game these days is marketed AAA unless it’s on the Wii, otherwise it does not get through Q&A, becuase it’s not worth putting it on shelves.

Well a good 95% of publishers are fending off bankruptcy and atleast 5 or 6 this generation have gone under or had to merge.

So yeah, it seems likely to me.

@G1GA
So then, unless I have taken part in game developments and mod groups that have NO clue about technical terms, then UV maps is the planar net of a model. The one which you use as a basis to(by hand) create textures for a model. That is unless you are using something like zbrush(?), or whatever it’s called.

Even textures in Fable 2 have a basis in photography. But that does not mean that texture artists take photos and applie them directly to objects. There is always hand edited elements, and ‘drawn’ parts.

“Well a good 95% of publishers are fending off bankruptcy”

No… not fending off, bankrupt, pure and simple. The sales that the average game would need to meet this “average” budget would be insane. We’re talking the average HD game having to be a million seller to be profitable.

I swear someone from Ubisoft or EA said exactly that recently. (needing to sell 1 million to be profitable)

And I wasn’t trying to chnange what you said, I was saying what you said is happening now. Midway, THQ, TakeTwo, Eidos, Tecmo, Koei, there’s probably more.

It’s happening already.

As I said. A UV map is basically a set of co-ordinates. There is no painting involved or even necessary, since they will never be seen in-game. Anyone who knows anything about Max or Maya knows that, surely!

As for Fable II, then I mentioned it specifically, because I sit next to someone who used to work with one of the main artists to work on it, and I know that he works directly from hand rather than photography, because that’s his particular style.

And I’ve never even mentioned using photos… You did!

You were wrong in that too. “And texture resolution is only downsized like that when it’s sampled from a photo.”

Like I said, any decent artist is going to work as large and as detailed as he can, whether he’s working in painter, or from a photo, and then reduce the resolution.

Doing this keeps lots of detail in the reduced texture and the larger source file can also be kept for use in other texturing if needed later.

UV maps aren’t seen in game, I know that, but they are guidelines to tell you how or more to the point, where to create your texture – right?

And yeah, you’re right, there’s no reason that they’d work small, even if they worked by hand. I just assumed you meant when they were massive like 500dpi or something.

“they are guidelines to tell you how or more to the point, where to create your texture – right?”

You could use them to do that if you needed to, but it depends on how you are mapping the model and how many textures you are going to use.

They are commonly used in that way for texturing low poly character models and the like with a single texture.

Also, dpi is only really needed for printing, so I didn’t mean that. I usually collect images as large as possible, make the texture at that size, then reduce it and sharpen it up a bit once it’s complete.

It doesn’t have to be too big, but as long as it’s bigger than the intended texture size you shouldn’t have to worry about losing the all important sharpness that makes the game look good.

Yeah – okay just so logn as know slightly what I am talking about. Well that’s what I have done to make texture maps in the past.

take the UV map as one layer on photoshop, and then use it to guage where the texture goes on another layer.