johnwhelan
Well-known member
From www.anandtech.com
Iwata spoke of the “Death Spiral” in game development. Game developers face financial pressure to get games out on time; the developers rely on game sales to fund both current and future projects, so without that revenue stream there’s no hope for game development to continue. The financial pressure leads to less time to work on and perfect a game, which then leads to poor quality and poor sales. The spiral continues downwards until the developer can no longer remain competitive in the industry.
Iwata himself saw this death spiral first hand, as his previous job as a developer left him with 2 days to ship a title that needed months worth of work. Iwata sacrificed the quality due to sales pressure and eventually had to help restructure his company (HAL Laboratory) for bankruptcy. A much younger Iwata blamed finances alone for his employer’s failure as a game developer, but today Iwata believes that it has just as much to do with talent and approach to game development. His change in perspective is thanks to one man in particular: Shigeru Miyamoto.
Full article here:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3534&p=1
Another interesting related article is here, apparently 64 bit performance is about the same as 32 bit performance but the products are more stable.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/64-bit-vista-gaming,2250.html
I suspect Trainz will need 64 bit sometime shortly to cope with the additional demands from newer layouts.
Cheerio John
Iwata spoke of the “Death Spiral” in game development. Game developers face financial pressure to get games out on time; the developers rely on game sales to fund both current and future projects, so without that revenue stream there’s no hope for game development to continue. The financial pressure leads to less time to work on and perfect a game, which then leads to poor quality and poor sales. The spiral continues downwards until the developer can no longer remain competitive in the industry.
Iwata himself saw this death spiral first hand, as his previous job as a developer left him with 2 days to ship a title that needed months worth of work. Iwata sacrificed the quality due to sales pressure and eventually had to help restructure his company (HAL Laboratory) for bankruptcy. A much younger Iwata blamed finances alone for his employer’s failure as a game developer, but today Iwata believes that it has just as much to do with talent and approach to game development. His change in perspective is thanks to one man in particular: Shigeru Miyamoto.
Full article here:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3534&p=1
Another interesting related article is here, apparently 64 bit performance is about the same as 32 bit performance but the products are more stable.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/64-bit-vista-gaming,2250.html
I suspect Trainz will need 64 bit sometime shortly to cope with the additional demands from newer layouts.
Cheerio John