What this means is simply that Microsoft is saying to Sony: "We're happy with 256MB as long as you are too . But if you want to up the ante to 512MB, we're prepared to match you."
My money says the next-gen consoles will have 256MB.
Here's the irony of game development: Game concepts are next to worthless, and yet most games are funded on the basis of them.
Game concepts are easy and plentiful. Poke any gamer, much less any experienced developer, and out will pop a dozen concepts like cash from of a corpse in GTA. What makes a great game is not the concept but (in part) the design. It's the fleshed-out design that will determine whether the game will be any fun and whether the high-level concept will have any "legs". But a great game design can only come from experience, a highly attuned intuition, a lot of intelligence, and more experience. (Not to mention that game design is an iterative process -- the design of a great game is practically always determined coextensively with its development.)
The conundrum of this industry is that communicating a great game design, unlike a game concept, is extremely difficult if not impossible. Very few people can write or read a game design document with any sense of whether it formulates a successful design. Think about all of the elements of Doom -- visual, audible, spatial, and temporal -- that made it such a great game. Could you truly communicate this in terms of text on paper? Not even if you were Tom Clancy or Stephen King.
For the most part, publishers couldn't tell a great game design if you locked them in a room with it. So the irony is that publishers do not, for the most part, evaluate game designs so much as they evaluate concepts -- what can be communicated in a few dozen pages at most. You can't blame them for this -- few people could. I wouldn't want that job -- betting millions of my employer's dollars plus my ass on whether some rag-tag bunch of geeks can put together a game that will fly.
If publishers made their funding decisions on the basis of game concepts a such, in isolation, they would be out of business in short order. Lottery tickets hold much better odds. So instead they hedge, using the experience and track record of the developers the way a mortgage company uses your credit report. An interesting game concept coupled with a proven development team is still very risky, but at least has a chance of getting funded, and if one in five hits big, the publisher might remain solvent.
This, in simplistic terms, is why game concepts by themselves aren't worth diddly.
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What this means is simply that Microsoft is saying to Sony: "We're happy with 256MB as long as you are too . But if you want to up the ante to 512MB, we're prepared to match you." My money says the next-gen consoles will have 256MB.
All the more so because said fucking idiot doesn't realize that Doom 3 doesn't even use shadow maps.
Game concepts are easy and plentiful. Poke any gamer, much less any experienced developer, and out will pop a dozen concepts like cash from of a corpse in GTA. What makes a great game is not the concept but (in part) the design. It's the fleshed-out design that will determine whether the game will be any fun and whether the high-level concept will have any "legs". But a great game design can only come from experience, a highly attuned intuition, a lot of intelligence, and more experience. (Not to mention that game design is an iterative process -- the design of a great game is practically always determined coextensively with its development.)
The conundrum of this industry is that communicating a great game design, unlike a game concept, is extremely difficult if not impossible. Very few people can write or read a game design document with any sense of whether it formulates a successful design. Think about all of the elements of Doom -- visual, audible, spatial, and temporal -- that made it such a great game. Could you truly communicate this in terms of text on paper? Not even if you were Tom Clancy or Stephen King.
For the most part, publishers couldn't tell a great game design if you locked them in a room with it. So the irony is that publishers do not, for the most part, evaluate game designs so much as they evaluate concepts -- what can be communicated in a few dozen pages at most. You can't blame them for this -- few people could. I wouldn't want that job -- betting millions of my employer's dollars plus my ass on whether some rag-tag bunch of geeks can put together a game that will fly.
If publishers made their funding decisions on the basis of game concepts a such, in isolation, they would be out of business in short order. Lottery tickets hold much better odds. So instead they hedge, using the experience and track record of the developers the way a mortgage company uses your credit report. An interesting game concept coupled with a proven development team is still very risky, but at least has a chance of getting funded, and if one in five hits big, the publisher might remain solvent.
This, in simplistic terms, is why game concepts by themselves aren't worth diddly.