Developers Obsessing Over Technology Rather Than Using it

The video gaming industry is in reality a community, in essence. Developers learn tips and tricks off of each other, competition urges them to progress further and further, and developers even save one another in a time of need. Nevertheless, there comes a time when the truth hurts and this is, plain and simple, the principle that Media Molecule is employing when it comes to their take on the industry as it stands today.

From the precedence of this generation of gaming and continuing even today, developers continue to exemplify the capabilities and point out the difficulties of working with this generation’s hardware. While this has all been said and done, where is the progression? This is the stance of Media Molecule’s, Alex Evans, on the current state of the gaming industry. According to the co-founder of the Sony studio:

“I think there’s a huge mistake that the industry makes as a whole and that is to talk about technology as this arms race – who’s got the coolest shaders and who’s got the most polygons. Why are we not using this fancy technology to make the images that we deliver more beautiful?”

For the developers that are not so positive on the PS3’s architecture, the LittleBigPlanet creator had an amusing but effectively advisable simile about game development on new hardware, like the PS3, and our own human bodies:

“All the people who have a desire to create something end up being utterly miserable because they can’t iterate. It’s like being punched in the face – you have to fail at something to know how to fix it and if you can’t fail quickly you’re doomed.”

Could this concept be so crazy that it works? Using difficult tools to make games simpler Clearly, this model is emphasized in their flagship series, LittleBigPlanet, because, while the game may seem simple on the surface, behind the scenes are the workings of rigorous real-time calculations and computations making the level creation tools extremely easy to use for the player. But what do developers know? Is Alex Evans spot on with his claims or do developers such as Square Enix or Ninja Theory know better?

[Source]

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