The approaching week heralds the start of the annual Game Developers Conference over in San Francisco. As the name suggests, it’s more of a developer shindig than a marketing exercise, but you generally tend to get a bucket of announcements before, during and after the event that tend to mix things up a little. However, instead of just pulling through what’s going on during the week and what’s in the announcement pipeline, I thought I’d mix things up a little by throwing in some opinion on some of the key things that have caught my eye so far.
PlayStation 3: Nice box, hefty price
Starting off, we have a pile of stuff around the Playstation 3. There’s been murmurings around a price cut for months now, with developers crying out for one and Sony steadfastly refusing to do anything about it. With this there’s a bit of history – at launch the Playstation 3 wasn’t a must have accessory. People weren’t queueing up to buy it as they had all picked up Xbox 360s and were having fun with them. The only real pitch Sony had was to position it as a cheap Blu-ray player as well as a games console and pick up some purchases from the enthusiast AV/home cinema crowd. Moving forward, now they’ve got a stack of top quality games on the platform but there’s still nothing there to help persuade players to switch from the Xbox or Wii. In fact, there’s a handful of reasons why players like myself aren’t running out there and buying one.
- That £300 price tag. It doesn’t matter if the build quality is better or the technology’s superior if there’s two other consoles out there for significantly less dough. With the 360 for £170 and the Wii at £180, I’m really struggling to justify parting with three hundred notes for Sony’s box. I don’t have a blu-ray player and my TV only does 720P, so I’m in no rush to upgrade to hi-def film and will probably only do so when my upscaling DVD player breaks.
- The friends list tie-in. On Xbox Live I’ve got all my friends listed there. I get alerts when they come online and get invites to multiplayer sessions through it. It’s all seamless, and it all ties in with my MSN/Windows Live neatly. If I move over to the PS3, I lose all that and have to rebuild it again. Coupled with the problem that most of my mates aren’t PS3 owners anyway and it means that most of my tine would be made up of solo play or multiplayer with some random teenager with Tourette’s.
- The lack of compelling exclusives. Most of the stuff I want to play is available on both platforms and where you have an exclusive deal on one you can usually find an equivalent title on another (think Gears of War, Killzone and Resistance: Fall of Man). There is stuff on there like Flower and Pixel Junk: Eden, but these are just downloadables and certainly not something I’d splash out a huge chunk of wedge just to play.
Now I might not be your typical Sony customer, but it’s just the way I read things at the moment. The only thing the PS3 has going for it at the moment is the technology. If it can hang in there for about another year, you’ll start to hear developers complaining of capping out on what the XBox 360 is capable of. If that starts to happen and you get simultaneous releases that have a huge difference in quality between versions on the two consoles, you might find people more willing to bite the bullet and migrate. Until then though, about all Sony can do is change the price and encourage more people to give the system a try.
The PhysX Card: Substituted with a Software API
The next thing I’m struggling to grapple with is the flavour of the month feature of doing physics work on the GPU. This has been kicking around ever since NVidia bought Ageia, a small company that specialised in making expansion cards and an accompanying API (called PhysX) purely to deal with physics based calculations. The idea was that effects could be made more realistic by performing more accurate collision modelling, cloth effects and so on. NVidia bought the tech, turned it into a software API and got it it run on their own graphics processors. They’ve now licensed the tech to Sony for use in the Playstation 3, meaning that developers can now use the GPU instead of one of the Cell cores for physics work. I’m still trying to work out why anyone would bother with this, as devs are still struggling to push the Cell to it’s maximum performance with current titles. Besides, most places seem to be using Havok for their middleware, so why trying to grapple with something else that’s not really needed? And wouldn’t it be more sensible for someone like Intel to pick this one up if it was really needed and cram it into their line of processors before shunting the frames off to the GPU for assembly and rendering? The whole thing feels like a tick-box feature without any real use and will probably be made redundant with CPU development over time, just like maths coprocessors.
Finally, this year’s conference seems to have a large chunk of it devoted to the legendary Casual Gamer. The general punditry goes that the Nintendo Wii is a casual gaming platform designed for casual gamers. As it’s shown that there is a market out there for casual gamers due to it’s astronomical sales, the logic follows that developers should be making games to target them. Now, without getting into the whole debate over what a casual gamer is (I’ll save that for another blogpost) are these people actually picking up many thirdparty titles to play on their console? I’d love to see some stats on this, as my gut feel (and I hope I’m wrong) is that most Wii owners are playing Wii Fit/Music/Sports, or a Mario, Sonic or Zelda game and not much else besides. My other wonder is how platforms like the DS or iPhone come into it – are these casual gamers trying something out, or hardcore gamers having a bit of a “game snack” during their free time? Again, I’d love to see some stats.
So, while the yearly developer gathering takes place it’ll be interesting to see what comes out. I also wonder what their hopes are for the year and what direction they’d like to see the industry head in. Till then, it’ll be gamers like ourselves who are peering in from outside, guessing at what’s going to happen next. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll work out if I fall into the Hardcore or Casual bracket.
Tags: casual gamer, development, Game Developers Conference, nvidia, physx, playstation 3
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As far as I’m concerned, the best reason to get a PS3 is Little Big Planet (http://www.littlebigplanet.com/). Mapp points out that the Wii doesn’t have many good games (just a lot of crap ones) and the 360 has the red ring of death issue which he is wary of. The 360 also charges for multiplayer use (the PS3 doesn’t), but while the PS3 is not perfect, it sure is reliable, and we have never had a problem with ours. Games aren’t region-locked so you can buy games as import from the US if you’re desperate.
I can categorically say that the Wii has not even been touched since the new year. The PS3 fills our consoling needs pretty well!
I completely agree with you on the Wii. Apart from a couple of gems it really doesn’t have the depth of compelling titles for my kind of game playing. I think the best finds have been downloadable ones from the Wii Store, where I managed to pick up ports of the old Super Mario games. In the main though I think most of my collection are first-party Mario or Zelda titles with the only exceptions being Guitar Hero (excellent but also on other platforms) and Mortal Kombat (absolutely dire).
I think the problem is when you move on from the Wii to the Xbox 360 or PS3. If you’re starting out fresh it’s all much of a muchness, with arguments on both sides of the fence. I guess what I’m trying to say is that once you have either of them, it’s much harder to justify buying the other. One of the deciding factors that pushed me into the Xbox camp was that most of my friends had one and I wanted to ensure a reasonable chance of being able to hook up for multiplayer sessions. That and it was easier for me to part with £300 than £400 once you factor in a couple of games, a 2nd controller and the stupid £60 wireless adaptor the Xbox needs.
On PS3 multiplayer though, Sony charge developers for the network transport costs rather than the end user. It means that on top of licensing and approval costs, as a developer you also have these variable costs just to support players downloading the game. On the Xbox 360 the costs are instead pushed out to the end user in the form of a subscription allowing the developer to more accurately predict what it’ll take to put a downloadable game on the platform. There’s benefits to both models (wider target market vs. fixed cost distribution) and it’s going to take a while to see which one is ultimately more favoured.