Typically, the way that the console business cycle has gone is that every five years, a new generation has launched and forced developers to adapt to new platforms. While that cycle appears to have stopped with this console generation, EVP Core Games at THQ Danny Bilson thinks that launching new platforms in a few years would be a disaster.
“It would be horrible,” said Bilson. “But I think they all know our model’s broken anyway. It still costs us a fortune to make games on this platform. If they’re going to up the scale, up the art, up the content, I don’t know how to make that and sell it to anybody for under $100 a game.”
“Who wants to do that?” he asked. “It’s bad for everybody.”
Bilson argues that now that the technology of consoles is down pat, developers can concentrate on being creative. “Stability of technology allows for the fruition and the growth of creative,” he declared. “We’re not having to invest all of our focus, and, oh my god, how are we going to deal with that new technology? We understand it. We still have guys trying to squeeze it to do cooler stuff, but it puts the weight of the mission under creative, which ultimately should get us more interesting and more creative stuff.”
“That’s the trick. We’re not going to get beat by another hardware upgrade like every five years like it was before. There will be little things. It’s up to us to compete in graphics and creativity. Sometimes I hope good creativity and style will be able to be more important. It is more important,” he continued. “As long as we’re creatively satisfied as gamers by what we’re getting, I’m really satisfied,” he added. “I still see cooler stuff, better stuff. So much is in the software engineering and working with the technology. I look at games and I go, wow, how did they get such great characters?”
Source: Eurogamer
