With fears that the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft might end up being quite expensive, with some even expecting $1,000 price tags, a developer has spoken out against the idea. In a social media post, former artist and art director at Naughty Dog and Rocksteady, Del Walker, has said that making more expensive consoles won’t necessarily result in better games.
He brought up a variety of problems facing the gaming industry these days, including ballooning budgets thanks to additional complexity and development time required to develop for modern gaming hardware. He then questioned whether these recent advances in hardware have led to games being more enjoyable.
“The next generation of consoles will cause more bloodshed. The cost of game development has never gone down when a new console arises; it always just adds complexity, cost, and dev time, but are the games truly more enjoyable? Debatable,” he wrote.
Walker also brought up the idea that artistic endeavors like game development tend to thrive when there are plenty of constraints placed on the artists. This also leads to development teams working more efficiently in order to reduce wasted effort and hardware resources. As things currently stand, game development budgets will likely go even higher, and when a game doesn’t sell well enough to justify its costs, layoffs are inevitable.
“Limitations are where the best magic happens when making a game, and less of it causes waste. When costs go up, you get less winners and more layoffs. I genuinely, with all my heart, wished the PS6 and Xbox Project Helix never steps foot into this decade,” he concluded.
In the replies, he then brought up an interesting point about the stagnation of game design in recent times. Since big-budget games need to hit as wide an audience as possible, Walker believes that this has led to games even simplifying their puzzles, with sidekicks giving players the solutions.
Walker’s statement comes just a couple of days after rumors indicated that the PS6’s bill of materials has gone up by around $200 since March. Back then, it was already at around $760. This new bill of materials might lead to Sony needing to charge over $1,000 if it wants to make a profit on the console. The previous costs would have allowed the company to absorb a bit of the cost and price the console at around $699.
Whether Sony will actually eat some of the costs in favor of a more reasonable price tag remains to be seen. Earlier this week, Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino spoke about how it was “not realistic” for the company to absorb prices in light of growing component costs.
“As for pricing, it is not realistic for us to absorb all component cost increases, and we have already implemented some price increases outside Japan,” he said. “At present, however, sales are proceeding as planned, and we do not believe this has led to a decline in customer demand.”
As for Project Helix, Microsoft is apparently rethinking its approach when it comes to console hardware thanks to its high expected price tag.
