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Do Next-Gen Games Have to be 3D?
sudnshok asks: "Last week, an article was posted where an EA executive discussed the high cost involved with next-gen game development. While I agree that sports games do benefit from a high-resolution 3D environment, do all games have to be developed that way? Why can't game companies develop 2D games for these systems? I would assume the development cost would be much lower. As a gamer who grew up on the NES, I'd love to see a new 2D side-scrolling installment of Castlevania or Zelda. I'm curious if other gamers would buy 2D games for next-gen systems."
The handheld market is still chock-full of 2D games, including the new installments of Castlevania and the like that you seem to be after. It's a helluva lot cheaper and doesn't waste the 3 gigahertz processors and state of the art GPUs the home consoles are built with nowadays. Buy a Nintendo DS and you are guaranteed access to a couple hundred good 2D games (counting that the machine plays GBA games as well). Looking at handheld console sales, it's a golden age right now for these machines - the DS is selling better than just about everything else, and even the underdog PSP has sold more machines than the original Xbox by now. Bottom line: there's just no point in spending $250-600 on a new system to make games with graphics the same as a $40 SNES.
That's not to say that there aren't those games such as the Xbox Live Arcade hits that aren't in 2D, but for the most part that's just a bonus feature, and not the reason the system is selling. Chances are if it's a retail game and it's 2D it's going to be handheld. And that's okay.