I know, I know. It sounds crazy. The possibility of a successful system that is embedded in millions and millions of houses actually hurting an industry that is depending on it.
That’s the rub, though. The industry right now is depending on the 360 and the system isn’t living up to its end.
Now, before we get into it, this has nothing to do with the large amount of 360s that had died or are dying. This absolutely has nothing to do with that because most fans of the system don’t mind getting a new system under the current warranty offered by Microsoft.
The real issue here is the system is sporting old technology, mainly the DVD drive. Countless developers are having to cut back on the games they have developed to fit their content on these discs. One example is from Brian Ashcraft’s article in Kotaku in regards to one of Capcom’s team having to cut back content on the upcoming Lost Planet 2. Here’s an excerpt from Ashcraft’s article:
“This time, truly, the content that was cut was significant,” Takeuchi added, “and at the end, we had to wrestle with disc space.”
That’s just one example. What about Final Fantasy XIII where Square-Enix had to fit, and possibly cut back on visual quality, their game on three DVDs?
My question to you is this…. How many games had to cut back to fit onto a format that is over a decade old? How many developers had to underachieve to meet the demands of a huge fanbase (and to basically survive) because the 360 didn’t go Blu-ray or some other large format?
More importantly, is this good for the industry?
Maybe it isn’t Microsoft that needs to change, maybe it’s the developers. Who knows, but regardless if something doesn’t change quick then the industry is going to hit a wall and someone is going to get hurt in the process.
Right now, it’s the gamers.
