Gearbox president Randy Pitchford has recently become one of the more outspoken executives in gaming, taking Valve to task over the company’s Steam service. Speaking to OXM, Pitchford thinks that certain developers, namely Crytek and id Software, have mistimed their releases this generation.
"Anyone that built their strategies around the last generation timing, and is trying to employ those strategies today, is either being forced to adapt very quickly or is risking failure," said Pitchford, seemingly referring to the ‘typical’ five-year console cycle. "This is going to be the longest generation we've seen in the last few of them."
"Some people have invested a lot going to a place that's too far, and the customers aren't ready for that yet because they don't have the hardware for it, so they can't find the market,” he added. “I was thinking of Crytek, they couldn't find a market because they made a game [Crysis] that very few people could play. I'm not putting words in their mouth, I remember reading something publicly where they said they couldn't put this on consoles because of the hardware..."
"We see the id guys talking continuously about this, [with Rage] - 'well, Sony will have a Blu-Ray and I don't know what we'll do on the 360, maybe we'll have three DVD's... if the publisher will let us do that, maybe we'll errrrahh I dunno.' Because they're in this kind of ‘generation plus’ mode, and like nobody knows what the generation beyond this one is going to look like."
While Crytek may have initially stumbled by releasing Crysis with high system requirements exclusively on PC, they have revised their plans and have made CryEngine 3 optimized for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. We’re also confident id Sofware will find a way to squeeze Rage on to two DVDs for the Xbox 360; there’s too big a market for them not to.
1 Comments
November 17, 2009
Note that EA is the publisher behind both of these games (Crysis & Rage). Crysis will be releasing on the OnLive platform pretty soon. It will be interesting to see how that goes!