Console Price Cuts And The Holiday Season

Thanks to CNN Money for their article discussing the state of the console market heading into the Xmas season. The author discusses the lack of major price-cuts for the PS2 and Xbox, suggesting: "Sony feels it can make more money this holiday season from its existing customer base", and speculating: "It's more and more likely that the reason we haven't seen price cuts from Sony and Microsoft is their next generation machines won't hit stores until 2006." If this is the case, it's suggested that "...the life cycle of this [hardware] generation will be the longest of any in the industry's short history", perhaps surprising considering rapidly advancing technology.

Re:Diminishing returns

[grahamwest]

1080i and/or 720p HDTV at 60Hz will be the standard for all games on the next generation of consoles. You can do HDTV on Xbox now but going beyond 480p mostly precludes anti-aliasing and limits scene complexity because you only have about 1.2GTexel/sec of raw fillrate. Right now this isn't too big a deal because HDTV has limited market penetration but HDTV is definitely the future.

Global illumination will be a big differentiator too - Doom 3 is the first glimpse of this, but with more powerful hardware lighting will get really compelling. Games like Resident Evil or Fatal Frame will be able to crank up the tension a few more notches.

Procedural geometry and animation through shaders will also add to gameplay. A lush, dense forest with waving branches that have collision with the player and can be broken off or set on fire could provide a bunch of interesting gameplay in a game like Counterstrike.

More memory and more horsepower will allow game worlds to be more interactive. Games like Red Faction and Otogi are a good start but there's a lot more that can be done especially when you add in a good physics engine. You could make a pretty cool demolition derby motocross game where bomb-cratering the track changes the racing line and sets you up to make jumps to new areas of the course, not to mention spattering nearby cars with mud to reduce their visibility.

Gamers want compelling and intensely involving experiences. Presentation is part of how you achieve that involvement. If you're willing to make your game world's representation more abstract you can cut back on the amount of computing power needed to express it, but that isn't what gamers pay for.