No where is this better shown then the Android ecosystem where older weaker phones are quickly becoming completely incomparable with the best rated games and phone manufacturers that don’t include high end processors are quickly dying out.

The most used console in our house, and the most “powerful” graphics wise is a 360. But even on the XBox, the games we play most consistently are mostly DLC like Castle Crashers and Geometry Wars. While I certainly admire the detail in something like Assassin’s Creed II, I’m actually unable to play it because we don’t have a flatscreen/HD TV and so all the text and maps become so small as to be unreadable.

All of which is to say– the quality of a game doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how detailed or complex it is. I’d rather see game designers looking to do interesting, unique things with a game, rather than just see how high they can get the resolution.

Don’t a bunch of final fantasy titles have huge multidisk sets?  I never played any of them (yes I know I’m not a “true gamer”) but that worked out for playstation hardware.  Were they installed to disk? or was the plot so linear that you come to a point where it tells you to put in disk n+1?

Although the PS3 used BDs, not DVDs, so in some respects it was ahead of most PC distributions there. Have any games been released for PC on BD?

Better than coders relying on upcoming hardware to fix the performance issues in their games.

I’d argue that not significantly upgrading the base platform for 7+ years (xbox 360) or 6+ years (playstation 3) is quite detrimental to the state of the industry.

By naive reckoning, there’s been around 4.67 hardware generations since the first xbox 360.  After maybe 2 or 3 generations, developers have totally topped out the capacity of the platform.

For example, the first Mass Effect game was stellar, a wonderful game, I still play it occasionally.  It’s IMMENSE, just full of content, NPCs, side-stories, player determined plot choices, weapon/armor/biotic choices.  But it was limited by the RAM of the platform and by the size of the DVD media.  The textures and visual detail weren’t great and other things like backgrounds were skimped on.  It was a game that was more ambitious than the outdated hardware.

The platform is supposed to enable great games and make it available to the masses.  By not upgrading the consoles regularly, and leaving over half a decade between iterations, the platforms age into becoming a liability rather than asset to the developers.

I think that limited hardware encourages more creativity with regards to efficient coding, and so when there’s finally an upgrade then the improvements are huge. Better than coders relying on upcoming hardware to fix the performance issues in their games.

Feh.