Increased dev costs created a paradox

This paradox might be tough to swallow for some elitists but PCs and consoles NEED each other to thrive. Thanks to increased demand for hard-core mechanics, all games previously deemed PC-centric find their way to all consoles. In the past it used to be just Xbox with strategies or sim-lite games shared with PC, now it's everywhere and there are more genres involved.

Do you think these two need each other in order to let the market thrive?

I think you're absolutely right on this. Still, it's nice to know there are developers out there who really want to push the boundaries for games like Star Citizen.

Personally it was never about the genre diversity or exclusive content, just the superior visual fidelity and more flexibility, customization stuff, etc. Either way, I'm no elitist, there isn't much that will convince you to turn hermit if you've always preferred consoles. it's just down to preference.

Only a fool would honestly believe the gaming industry, as whole, doesn't need both consoles and PC. They are there to supply a demand, console has its audience as does the PC.

No one should take System Wars seriously, ever.

Honestly, a game with a huge budget that ends up being worth playing is very rare these days, anyway. I do think that people who make those games need as many avenues to reach consumers as possible, but I no longer care about the health of the industry overall. As long as there are electronic devices, there will be people who make games to be played on them, and there will always be some gems worth playing. Gaming would be far more niche, but I think the overall quality would be better, if the AAA model would just die.

This.

Sigh, I've met with some of those people in real life. Never again.

You are in the tiny, tiny minority though. Most gamers prefer AAA games like GTAV over random indie stuff.

Consoles play a very important role in keeping the gaming audience large and diverse. Denying that is just ignorant. Without consoles gaming would be a fraction of its size it is today.

Gaming is larger, more diverse, and higher quality than it ever would have been if it was still a niche thing people did on their computers.

And that is one of the reasons why I hate going to Gamestop.

Agreed....

And with the cost of Triple A development... we will get a lot more of these "indie" like titles to fill the longer and longer gaps between the Triple A releases. And these Triple A releases will need as much traffic as possible and will/should be available across all platforms.

@Salt_The_Fries: Increased dev costs created DLC. Either consoles or PC could do without each other as long as DLC remains successful. Without DLC game prices would have went up a lot. Pick your poison.

@prawephet: DLC has been around forever. It used to be called expansions or games would get yearly sequels. DLC just allows devs to get content to people quicker and without the overhead.

Expansions only existed because you couldn't just push 500 mbs of patches to people with new content. The only way to pack content before broadband internet was popular was to treat it like a retail release. This meant your overhead was going to be far larger, so to be profitable you had to charge more for it, and the only way to get away with charging more was to make more content so people would actually buy it.

DLC is superior in a lot of ways. Of course it's going through some growing pains, but it's generally a better way to distribute content post-release. Cheap $10-20 DLC content released by a smaller team in the months following the launch of the game does a good job of expanding the game and keeping us entertained until the sequel or next title from the studio is released. It makes the studio more money and gives us more focused content more quickly after launch.

I agree, but isn't that where we are heading, anyway? The only AAA publishers that don't make consoles and aren't in danger of going bankrupt any time soon are EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and Rockstar. We rarely get new IPs from any of them, and they all (except for Rockstar) have at least 1 franchise that gets released every year. Rockstar goes years between any releases at all. Nobody is willing to risk a huge budget on a new IP, and games with a more reasonable budget are very unlikely to meet sales goals. On the rare occasion that one of them does have a new IP, like Watch Dogs, it just ends up being similar to other games already on the market. At some point, won't gamers get tired of these same tired franchises, and publishers decide that the risk of creating new ones is just too great?

There are fairly regular AAA new IPs though, and more publishers than you mention. I get that you're bored but most gamers aren't (judging by reviews and sales)

.. No.. They went multiplat because they have a greater possibility of increases profits, not because they need to.. Games like Divinity is a no brainer simply because it is a turn based game, meaning that a player can take all the time in the world to do what they need to do, a more obtuse controller will not change that.. Some genres and games do not work period on console in their current state due to controller restrictions with out major changes to the game..

... Immensely popular games like Minecraft prove you wrong. League of Legends is another massively popular game that started extremely small by a once small developer as well..

Are there? Looking at the upcoming AAA games slated for release on the PS4 this year, I see The Witcher 3, Arkham Knight, Metal Gear Solid 5, Rainbow 6 Siege, Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and Star Wars Battlefront. None of those games are new IPs.

Sequels are more common for sure but new IPs are there too. Bloodbourne, Destiny, Shadow Of Mordor, Alien Isolation (maybe not a new IP but utterly different to any previous Alien game), The Evil Within, Watchdogs are the ones I'm aware of so far on PS4. The PS4 being out a year and a half, there's a pretty major new IP every few months which ain't bad.

You might say that Watchdogs is too similar to AC/Far Cry, or Bloodbourne is just a renamed Souls game. Well, the other side of that coin is that there is innovation happening in sequels too. I expect Arkham Knight to be more exciting and innovative as a sequel than most new IPs, for instance.

Minecraft is a smash hit and gone into "cultural phenomenon" status like Pac Man, but it's only a lone exception to the rule.

LoL is massive for sure, I would have thought of that as a AAA title though? Maybe I'm wrong on that one. It's also free to play so I'm not sure how comparable it is to games that cost 60 or 70 euros.

If you look at the best selling games on any system, they are always blockbusters.

@locopatho: Good point. I wouldn't say Bloodborne is a AAA game, though, and it does borrow as heavily from the Souls IP as a sequel typically would. I guess the biggest disappointment is how often new AAA IPs are flops, either commercially or critically. It just doesn't seem sustainable to me. I just wish there were more publishers that would crank out medium-budget games like Nintendo does, only with more new IPs, ideally. It would be a lot easier to get excited about consoles if that were happening.

@PurpleMan5000: Funny, I'm the complete opposite, I chafe at how safe Nintendo plays it in most franchises. I'd love more blockbusters from them. LIke the Xenoblade, Zelda, and Metroid Prime series, and the Galaxy games.

Anyway, it's all moot, the market will support what it wants, we'll just wait and see :P

with current budgets for AAA games it would certainly be foolish to release it just on one platform. the more the merrier (as long as it doesnt cost a fortune to port...one of the reasons the wiiu is generally out of the running for AAA multiplats). the only exception is if someone is willing to foot the bill for an exclusive deal (like tomb raider).

i do worry though that even the PS4, X1 and PC combined are still not enough to sustain this level of development. the prevelance of season passes and such like seem to be an act of desperation to try and recoup the cost as quickly as possible since the risk is so great. im not against DLC/expansions or anything but i have never seen them being pushed so hard.

to make this level of cost more bearable we need more people playing games.

"Thanks to increased demand for hard-core mechanics, all games previously deemed PC-centric find their way to all consoles"

Umm no they don't. Whole genres don't exist on console. Pc provides; 99.9% of the RTS market, 99.9% of the mobo market 99% of the MMO market, 100% of the simulator types and space sims, and almost the entire of the FPS high competitive games and I'm missing whole swaths of it's genre's consoles just don't or can't play. So many games I couldn't even rap my head around how the hell you'd play them on a normal controller, or even have the abilities in box to do the things necessary to run the systems right (Eve is a prime example).