We are very excited for a future of 4K gaming.
Both Sony and Microsoft’s upcoming flagships promise to make this a possibility in the living room, while we are arguably already there with Nvidia and AMD’s latest GPU offerings.
But amid all the excitement and promise of new technology, there is one problem that the gaming industry still needs to address – it’s prohibitively expensive.
Not only for the consumer who will have to invest thousands of Rands in the coming years (provided they haven’t done so already), but more importantly for the people who are making the games.
First-party exclusives will be used as the standard for this upcoming 4K gaming generation and massive third-party developers like Bethesda, EA, Square Enix, Activision, Ubisoft will always give us games just by virtue of their size.
But what about everyone else?
As TechnoBuffalo reports, “What about the mid-sized publishers, the ones barely able to create games at a standard HD level?”
“Unless we’ve forgotten, the last time we saw a jump in gaming resolution on consoles, we sadly went through an era of mass extinction of gaming developers.”
“Companies we had known for years were not able to keep up with the speed at which technology was evolving or dedicate the resources needed to creating enough visual information on a 1080p screen, and a good many of them were forced to shut down.”
“Nintendo warned against the closure and flight of companies when it discovered the actual price of developing HD games, and in the end, it proved to be true.”
Now, of course there are a number of other major factors besides “higher resolutions” that have caused developer shutdowns in the last few years, but the cost of HD and now 4K asset development is a very real consideration.
“This future battleground of gaming is not only going to be between Microsoft and Sony.”
“It’s going to be convincing mid-range companies to either sink unprecedented finances into the latest games or take a smaller risk to play it safe with what works.”
“Only the largest publishers are set to benefit from making games even more resource demanding, but what about the rest?”
“Spend more money to make games that might sell a little better or maybe even a little worse?”
“No thanks.”
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BS. technology will move along with the times. Game development companies reinvest the exuberant amount of money that is milked from gamers to keep up with new technologies. In-fact the games developers are usually ahead of the hardware development and the drive the research into better gaming tech. There is more than enough money in the gaming industry to support the ongoing technology movement. If a game developing company goes bang due to the introduction of new tech they were probably more interested in buying new ferraris and weren’t worth following anyway.