Sony's visual policy (I think this will anger Mong).|General Gaming Discussion|Forum|SNES HUB

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an “official” Sony document that mentions this policy, though Victor Ireland at Working Designs was certainly quite outspoken about it.

Ironically, many of Working Design’s titles are now the most sought after on the PS2 and definitely the PS1, while practically no one cares many of the 3D games Sony was pushing at the time.

Lunar 2 Eternal Blue Compleet is one of my favourite games of all time and a lot of that is due to Working Desgins’ wonderful translation job.

Mong,

You can’t really compare pre-PS3 launch Sony directly to the present day Sony.  Just because Sony is pushing for Minecraft / FTL now, doesn’t mean that they weren’t pushing against having 2D games on their earlier platforms.  We are talking about an almost 20 year time frame, during which Sony would have had multiple leadership shakeups as well as changes in strategy / direction.

Speaking of Mega Man, there is a rumour that Capcom threatened to make Resident Evil 2 a Saturn exclusive unless Sony allowed them to localize Mega Man 8 / Mega Man X4 (I’ve seen both titles used in the rumour).  Doesn’t seem to be much substance to this rumour, so take it with a heaping pile of salt.

Either way, Sony has long had a reputation for shunning 2D games.  Whether this reputation is from an actual Sony policy or simply from rumours and speculation, we may never know.  I find it very ironic that Sony is viewed as being anti-2D, when the PS1 / PS2 had much, much more to offer than competing platforms when it came to 2D games.  You could easily fill up a library of 20+ quality games for the PS1/PS2 with nothing but 2D games.  Try doing that for the N64 and Gamecube…

There is probably a lot of organizational inertia causing the resistance to smaller, 2D indie style games at larger third party publishers, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

From a shareholder / upper management perspective, it makes sense to look at Minecraft, Terraria and their ilk and say “why can’t we do that?”

From an employee level, those games must scare the crap out of the average marketing employee or programmer (though I imagine that some programmers are inspired by these games as well).  Why would they be scared?  Well, if Nintendo, Sony, etc were to go back to making simpler indie style games, they wouldn’t necessarily need hundreds / thousands of development / marketing staff now would they?  So if your livelihood depended on being part of a large, triple-A title churning machine, wouldn’t you do everything it takes to keep that machine going?

Of course, market factors will likely cause a big shakeup in the development of triple-A titles, reducing their numbers significantly in the coming years.  As you’ve said, they’re simply to expensive to make and the market for them is, at best, maintaining a steady state.  Higher costs, spread over a constant, finite number of customers is a recipe for trouble, though that still doesn’t change the motivations of an individual programmer / marketing employee at present.

I should also point out that Sony has just asked consumers to spend $400 on a new, “better” console, with the promise of 1080p and 60 frames per second HD games.  Sony should absolutely get Minecraft on their machine (and I believe they ultimately will), though if Minecraft / Terraria are all that they are pushing on the PS4, it will inevitably raise the question; why do I need to upgrade?

Lastly, you bring up an important point regarding word of mouth marketing.  I don’t recall ever seeing a Mega Man or Contra commercial growing up, yet everyone knew these games and knew of their quality.  A great game will sell itself in the long run.

Firstly, apologies to Mark the Shark, as we seem to have drastically veered off topic.

You are correct that art direction trumps graphics power / tech 100% of the time since the 6th generation for 3D games and since the 4th generation for 2D games.  

I recall an old 1Up podcast where Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights was cohosting.  At the time, Too Human was still in development and had recently had a disastrous E3 showing.  Denis was deeply offended when one of the hosts said that Okami was a better looking game then Too Human.  Denis was incredulous that anyone could think that, since Okami was running on last gen hardware.  How could that amazing water colour aesthetic possibly look better than the massive number of brown and grey shaded polygons that Too Human was pushing?

Re: the use of next gen tech to make graphics processing, etc. easier, I don’t know enough technically to comment on whether or not this is a valid excuse.  I do know that Epic obviously has a vested interest in selling a new version of the Unreal engine.  That said, it is important not to be Luddites.  Just because something CAN be done doesn’t mean that it can be done with a reasonable level of effort.  For example, building design does not need to be done with Auto CAD, it can technically be done by hand.  However, the efficiency improvements offered by Auto CAD are enormous, despite the high prices Auto Desk charges for the software.  I wonder if next gen gaming hardware has a similar value proposition (again, it isn’t my industry so I can’t really say one way or another).

It’s also important to note the difference between a small team (or often one person) working on an indie game, compared to modern development teams.  The indie team has a few small folks who wear multiple hats, meaning that a programmer would do level design, enemy AI, etc. and possibly graphics and sound as well.  This is of course how it was done during the 8 / 16-bit days.

On the other hand, the large developers have massive, but highly specialized teams.  Someone working on Call of Duty is likely in charge of nothing but gun sound effects.  Or gun muzzle graphical effects.  To ask these specialists to make the next Minecraft really isn’t practical.

Just some food for thought, as to why the big hardware manufacturers aren’t producing indie style games in-house.