THQ core games boss reveals concerns for future platform releases
THQ head of core games Danny Bilson has said that the arrival of a new generation of games consoles in the near-future would present a series of unpleasant issues for developers.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Bilson said that new consoles from the major hardware developers “would be horrible”.
“But I think they all know our model’s broken anyway,” he said.
"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? It's bad for everybody."
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Bilson cited the ability for developers to be increasingly creative on a stable platform set as a further reason for maintaining the current console generation.
“I just started playing Cataclysm,” he said.
“I had been away from WOW for maybe a year. I went back in and my first thing was, oh, the graphics are old, but then it's like, who cares when the creative and the content is great?
"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.”
Perhaps hinting at the direction he intends to take future THQ titles in, Bilson then described creative satisfaction as his main desire in both playing and developing titles.
"As long as we're creatively satisfied as gamers by what we're getting, I'm really satisfied," he said.
"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?”
The year the industry finally implodes as sales nosedive.
I completely disagree, if anything this generation of consoles is worse than anything else. I spend literally 70% of my time as an artist optimising and fixing issues, we have to balance such tiny budgets of texture streaming, physics memory, polygon counts, draw calls etc... I very much believe we reached a point where art in the industry changed, but unfortunately it gave us lots of possibilities with no real memory or power to actually do it! Instead development has become more of a balancing act than previous generations. I'm not saying its going to be a perfect world in the next generation, but we are very much at the point where art has balanced out the problem is we simply don't have the space or power to do it without spending a lot of time fitting everything in!
No one wants to go through another upgrade cycle, the world economy is in the toilet, publishers and devs want a breather from the technological arms race that development has become. Consumers have no desire to replace their hardware. We've finally got decent install bases on all 3 main consoles, Microsoft is finally profitable on the XBox project as a whole, and Sony haemorrhaged money trying to get the PS3 to market.
The forces for retaining the current generation for as long as possible are too strong.
