Next Generation Consoles-Friend of Foe?

Come holiday season 2005 the console giants are going to be pushing new hardware onto shelves but there has been a buzz in the industry as to whether the next generation of hardware is really all that great or whether its going to warp what was once a decently pure industry (in that most people making games made them because they love what they do) into some ugly cousin of hollywood. With E3 right around the corner (and this will no doubt be the biggest E3) its going to be very easy to be carried away in the hype of new promises of graphical power. There is absolutlely nothing wrong with increased graphical power especially when it gives developers increased means to exercise new creative ideas, but the history of increased graphical abilities seems to coincide with a large drop in creativity. Why is this? More graphical power means more detail and more detail means more art and more sophisticated graphics engines, which means exponentially larger development teams and exponentially higher costs and all with the expectation that everything will be done in the same amount of time as the previous generation. Publishing games involves a large investment and large risk. Games that once cost 2 million dollars to develop for the PSX were 20 million dollar PS2 titles and who knows what astronomical figure will be put forth for the PS3, XBOX 360, Nintendo Revolution era. If you look at the sales charts you’ll see that the majority of top games that publishers are willing to take risks on are sequeals or clones of successful titles. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/charts.php?tag=int_us Risk taking is effectively being cut out through each successive console generation. In March of every year the Game Developers Conference (GDC) is held in San Fransisco where, this year, some developers went off on the next generation consoles. All concerned gamers should read this:
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/burn_the_house_.html

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There’s no reason you can’t talk about that in there.

And just for the record, everyone already knows this =/

Luckily, there is still enough innovation out there to keep the industry alive. Besides, gamers are more powerful than you think – they won’t buy crap. Take GoldenEye: Rogue Agent; it was set up to be a million seller ‘sequel’ to a popular game, but it stagnated because of poor design.