Is it just me or are there a mess of games that people tend to buy just to show their device off to friends but aren't really all that fun TO ME?
I deeply doubt that in just a matter of years, there will be any possibility for portable devices to provide the same level of graphic acceleration as SLI or Crossfire. Unless Nvidia wanna kill themselves or Apple is able to "innovate" their own superior GPU (which Intel tried so hard but still can't).
All that cheap casual talk means is that mobile has cornered the budget market with $1-5 pricepoints. It doesn't mean they're destroying the AAA game market with $60 pricepoints.
With business models, in the console industry, software sells hardware. Gamers don't care about hardware as much as they do what type of IP they can play on it. Which is why all console makers have first party IP exclusives they leverage to sell hardware.
And the one thing Epic didn't bother to mention was that Apple did all their marketing for them by demoing their game at WWDC. How many developers have enjoyed that luxury? Epic, Gameloft, a couple other studios, that's it. Most developers see their titles buried in that commoditized mess called the app store with little fanfare. If Apple didn't demo Infinity Blade to help sell the iPad and stick that game in all their commercials, no way would Epic be pulling in $30 million ROI.
And $30 million is puny compared to the ROI of a blockbuster AAA game.
I don't understand how someone could have downvoted you. This is total sense.Activision can dump $100mil annually into the CoD/MW series because the games generate BILLIONS of dollars in revenue every release. At least the last three or four versions have generated hundreds of millions of dollars on launch day alone. MW2 set a single day entertainment sales record, Black Ops broke that record, MW3 broke Black Ops' record and I wouldn't be surprised if MW3's record gets broken this fall.
Now, can everyone have sales numbers like these? Of course not, but there is obviously still a place for big budget games like CoD/MW just like there is a place for big budget movies even though cat videos on YouTube get millions of views.
Lethal
But he is right, you cannot run a multi-million dollar game investment anymore...the returns just arent there for literally everyone but a select few.
Who needs all that when a game can be streamed without any lag or slowdown to your tablet? You won't need a superior GPU. Only a matter of time...
Probably because someone doesn't like one or more of the following:I don't understand how someone could have downvoted you. This is total sense.
If all you are doing is playing Angry Birds or Words with Friends lag is less of an issue.Don't mean to burst your bubble, but there will always be lag with streaming. It's unavoidable.
Experienced, talented and well-funded. But they flopped. Because iOS (to serious developers) is the gold rush now. A couple of people will have these huge success stories, but most won't.
Compared to the console world where you almost always make back your investment and break even. Even the biggest console flops (Duke Nukem Forever and co) turn a profit.
There is much less risk attached to making console games. They're going nowhere.
At the end of the day there are soooooooooo many more casual gamers/bored people out there that are happy to spend $0.99 on a game to pass time while commuting etc, just cause Epic made a heap of money of these bored communiting sods... does not indicate gamers are about to jump ship, on the contrary most consider mobile gaming without physical control to be a joke.
I don't code, so what makes programing for a game for a console so much more expensive than programing a game for any other platform?The amount of money required just to get a line of code onto a disc that can be read my a console is HUGE, much larger than the majority of other platforms. They aren't going away, but the amount of money going into that market WILL drop IF they don't adapt.
I wonder how many different definitions of "casual gamer" there are 'cause to me a casual gamer is typically a non-gamer that picked up a Wii plus a game or two (which lead to the Wii's massive rise) and then never bought another Wii game (which lead to the Wii's massive fall). Casual gamers are finicky, unreliable (from a platform loyalty perspective) and shouldn't be counted upon as the core demographic for something like a game console, IMO.The problem is, it's been the casual gamers who have made the last generation of handhelds and consoles profitable. Without them, the hardware manufacturers and the software studios wouldn't have the base to support the development of ever-more-expensive hardcore titles.
If Sony, MS and Nintendo were only making machines that did nothing but play current gen video games I might agree with you, but that's not the case. MS, Sony, and to a lesser degree Nintendo, are putting next gen home entertainment systems in your living room and have been doing it for over half a decade. I mean, look at everything XboxLive offers and video game content is only a fraction of it (and a shrinking fraction at that). Kinect was never just about casual gaming and with SmartGlass coming... wow.Next gen hardware won't save the console business if casual gamers don't bite. And casual gamers are clearly flocking to mobile devices. I don't see how Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft can get the math to work for any next gen devices without casual gamers.
What Infinity Blade (1&2) show is that if you have a game engine already paid for via other games (every other UE3 game) you can make a ton of money with effectively minimal work. You can't get visuals like that on a home grown engine cheaply.I haven't seen anyone try and argue that developers should all switch their platform of choice, and develop iOS. In fact that would fly in the face of what a few people (myself included) have said, which is that a gaming platform is a tool, it works better for some games than others. To ask every game developer to go make iOS games is retarded, and will surely be the end of studios. But the problem is not a lack of developers that want to make games, the problem is there is a finite amount of money that the general public spends on games (or even entertainment). What Infinity Blade shows is that a significant amount of that entertainment money is switching platforms. It would be stupid for console platforms to ignore that.
I deeply doubt that in just a matter of years, there will be any possibility for portable devices to provide the same level of graphic acceleration as SLI or Crossfire. Unless Nvidia wanna kill themselves or Apple is able to "innovate" their own superior GPU (which Intel tried so hard but still can't).