Capcom: Next gen development is "eight to ten times" more work
Masaru Ijuin describes need for new tools as publisher considers rising dev costs
The leading authority on Capcom's game engines has claimed that AAA development for the PS4 and Xbox One demands orders of magnitude more work than the current generation consoles.
In an interview published on Capcom's website, Masaru Ijuin, senior manager of technology and consumer games development, explained the publisher's incentives for replacing its current engine, "MT Framework," for the new generation of hardware.
"We believe 'MT Framework' is a powerful rendering engine, but it's clear that heightened game quality leads to a rise in the number of man hours," he said. "The amount of work involved in making games for next-gen consoles is eight to ten times greater than what is required for the current generation of consoles."
Ijuin admitted that Capcom encountered "problems and limitations" when using MT Framework for next-gen development, which triggered the creation of the company's new engine, "Panta Rhei." According to Ijuin, the complexity of the new technology meant that a simple upgrade of MT Framework would not have reduced the extra effort required by a wide enough margin.
"Improvements to "MT Framework" might have reduced the work time from one hour to 30 minutes. We sought to go beyond that and shorten those 30 minutes to ten."
While several publishing executives have downplayed the issue of rising production costs in calls to investors - including, but not limited to, Take Two's Strauss Zelnick - the development community has been more cautious about the impact of new consoles on the already tenuous economics of AAA game development.
"We're trying to do a lot of procedural stuff in this next generation to keep costs under control. It's one of the ways we're trying to keep that down, but it's still a cost increase," he said. "Each asset needs to be so much better, so much more defined, than it was in the previous generation. No amount of procedural is going to change the fact that your underlying asset just has to be that much better."
And if costs are indeed rising, that is mirrored by the escalating cost of AAA console gaming for the consumer. On both Xbox One and PlayStation 4, the price of a new game is significantly higher than the equivalent on the previous generation of consoles, and the price of the digital version is higher still.
If your game's name consists of only three letters, like for example G, T and A, or C, O and D, then you can spent virtually unlimited amount of money. Otherwise, it is time to face the reality. Next gen is no excuse for rising costs. Tools are getting better every day and talented studios in Eastern Europe can create assets for only a fraction of the cost of Japanese or North-American studios.
Though this does require a major Japanese developer/publisher to care about PC, which is proving strangely difficult.
Ijuin didn't make a blanket statement either, he specifically mentioned AAA and although the interview seems to point at tech, it actually looks like he is talking about the workflow and pipeline. AAA polygons are not going to build themselves and unfortunately the art pipeline has not actually evolved that much (some would say at all) to cover the huge gap in visual fidelity required for next-gen AAA.
This doesn't exclude working smarter or adapting to sub AAA standards and products or the market in general.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Tudor Nita on 13th January 2014 4:04pm
Not that strange. With so many cool consoles to choose from in the 80's/90's, the PC never caught on as a major gaming platform with Japanese gamers. I think Japanese devs just don't feel confident enough of their knowledge of the platform to release on it.
8% increase perhaps, 8 times, which is 800%? ummm no. Perhaps something was lost in translation, or at least I hope it was.
And the news are?
This is quite normal in each generation jump: you start tampering with new hardware with limited tools and knowledge. It's like Rockstar said when they explained why GTAV was released for current gen; "We have more tools and we know a lot more tricks"
Remember how many studios complained back them about how incredibly hard was to program for PS2? Remember also how at the end of it's life every single small studio was releasing stuff for the console? :)
However, looking back at the time between 2003-2007, history shows that all it takes is just one big flagship title to push the boundaries, and everyone else is forced to step up their game.
I wouldn't say his assessment is unrealistic. We might consistently have film-cg like production values before the end of this generation.
1) PS3 was a dog to develop for with its strange CPU and weak GPU.
2) We are experiencing no massive jump in resolution (that will come with 4K).
3) Development tools have got a whole lot better very suddenly. Years ago we had the jump from assembler to C++. Now we are having a similar jump to powerful development environments.
4) The two new consoles are pretty much the same as one another. Last generation the PS3 and 360 were incredibly different to each other.
5) The two new consoles are very, very similar to PCs, something we have been developing for since 1981. There is a huge mountain of transferable skills, tools, libraries etc.
6) Mobile and indies are teaching the industry to develop far more efficiently with more pre production and less wasted work. Surely the big console developers are taking this on board.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Bruce Everiss on 14th January 2014 4:32pm
These days, the push to get visuals polished up to a certain standard seems to be sucking the fun out of game development for some developers who just want to do stuff that's less polished but still fun to play. I guess some will learn those new tricks and nail a few solid games, but I don't think it's the end of the world if we see some not so hot-looking titles show up that are a lot more fun than they look (critics and overly graphics-whore-y fans be damned)...
I think that's part of the problem, but I think another, more troubling part of this problem is that Capcom and companies like it spend an inordinate amount of time developing and updating game engines. And for the life of me I can't see why.
If Capcom had moved to one of the industry standard engines, their development time might have increased a little. The companies who create those engines regularly update to support new tech, taking that development time away from video game producing companies (or rather, companies who don't make games merely to show off and sell their engines).
Get on Source or Unity or Unreal. Then most of these problems will disappear. Instead at the beginning of every console cycle you end up burning time and money updating your own engines to adapt to the new consoles and not simply making games on engines which already support those platforms.
I think there is a Japanese version of Unity on the way or already here, so it's not as if it's going to be impossible to see something coming (I hope).