Studios still spend ”a fortune to make games” on Xbox 360 and PS3 - a new console would skyrocket dev and retail costs - it would be ”bad for everybody.”
”It would be horrible,” said THQ core games VP Danny Bilson, ”but I think they all know our model’s broken anyway.” It takes time to ‘master’ a platform and refine budgets.
”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,” he warned. ”Who wants to do that? It’s bad for everybody.”
Now studios are past just the technological milestones and have moved more onto being creative - he uses World of Warcraft as an example where graphics yield to content. ”Stability of technology allows for the fruition and the growth of creative,” he said.
”We’re not having to invest all of our focus, and, oh my god, how are we going to deal with that new technology? We understand it. We still have guys trying to squeeze it to do cooler stuff, but it puts the weight of the mission under creative, which ultimately should get us more interesting and more creative stuff.”
”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. It is more important.”
”As long as we’re creatively satisfied as gamers by what we’re getting, I’m really satisfied,” he added. ”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?” Homefront releases in March and they want it among the big boys.
Publisher THQ has other major releases coming with Red Faction: Armageddon, UFC: Undisputed, the WWE franchise, Saints Row 3, Guillermo del Toro’s inSane, Devil’s Third, Dawn of War II: Retribution, Space Marine and Darksiders 2.