Games Thirst – Amazing Life
In a recent Videogamer interview, Crytek boss Cevat Yerli said PS Omni and Xbox Durango (or whatever they’ll finally be named), won’t have the impact that PS3 and Xbox 360 had because of one troublesome and costly issue: memory.
Speaking to the site, Cevat said memory is the single most important asset for a developer, yet it’s the most expensive for console makers. He said if Sony and Microsoft were able to somehow lower the cost of memory and put, say, 32 gigs in their upcoming machines, it’d be a developer’s dream.
He doubt, however, that that will be the case.
As a person who likes to drive technology-meets-game design as art, you can never have enough memory. Ever. Simple as that. Memory is the single most important thing that is always going to be underbalanced – I’ve never seen a console where the memory was the right balance.
Xbox 360, underbalanced. PlayStation 3, underbalanced. Simply because memory is the most expensive part, hence I wish there would be cheaper ways of doing memory so that memory doesn’t become an issue anymore.
If they find ways to cheapen the cost to a degree they could triple or quadruple their memory. Just say, ‘Hey we’re going to have 32 gigs of memory’. That would be quite amazing because memory can do so many more techniques and tricks.
The rising costs of actually developing a next-generation console will affect the ultimate decision on memory, especially because Sony and MS, if they’re not making profits on their new platforms, would at least want to break even and bring in cash through game sales. The idea that they’d lose money on every unit sold which would cut into profits made when games a sold, is not something either Sony or Microsoft would like to see, more so Sony, who’s PlayStation 4 must be a winner for the company.
Yerli added:
The current generation consoles, when they launched, were far ahead compared to PC. But PC has caught up. With current generation consoles and what’s on the horizon – new ones – due to the fact that the cost of CPU and memory are so much more expensive than they were in the past, it is simply impossible to have the same kind of impact on the console business; to be so far ahead of PC.
That was our guess already two years ago. That’s why we said back then that Crysis 3 is next-gen ready already. We did that without knowing the specs, but it’s not going to be much more than what we have done so far. And it turns out we were pretty much right. But the focus of next-gen is in a different area.
The world has changed because there’s so much more free content now that the AAA market is losing business, and the AAA market has to reclaim that business or they’ll have to move to free-to-play too.
