Gaming Pitfalls - Part II: Cross platform danger

Mike Bantick
Friday, 11 May 2007 16:14

Opinion and Analysis

Following on from the Big License Dilemma, this time we focus on those multiplatform games.  How does this affect quality especially for a big fish in a smallish pond, like the PlayStation 3?

As we spoke about in part one of this series, gaming is a business that is driven increasingly by the constraints of profit.  Hence the proliferation of ‘big name’ games with associated merchandising and book or movie tie-ins.

A further aspect of this increased commercialisation is the encouragement to get said game into as many homes or hands as possible.  Generally this will involve saturating the available gaming platforms with a version of the title.

On the surface this seems fantastic for the consumer with the almighty deity “Choice” being praised again for flexibility and piece of mind she brings.  There are also the economic benefits for developers and publishers alike as designers, testers and to a lesser extent programmers can all concentrate their efforts with a multiplatform title emerging.

This gives a larger sales market with the obvious advantage of maximising traditionally scarce resources per project.

So everything is fine, right?  Well, what if you own (arguably) the pinnacle of the current generation of gaming technology the PS3 (PC owners, hang on to your hats)?  Already there have been cases emerging of developers having difficulty extracting the full potential of the gaming hardware and still keeping the economies of scale.