Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Mark Green Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Licensed Developer Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 11:32:27 +0000 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 54 Message-ID: <36F8CD4B.30E447B5@reading.ac.uk> References: <36F896FE.D1C01655@home.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: ssfmse3.rdg.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en "J. Pretorius" wrote: > whom they license their development tools to. I was looking at the SCEA web site > and they don't even want to hear from potential developers unless you give them > detailed information about your company including management biographies. SCEE seem a little less harsh based on their web site, but of course I don't know what they'll ask for beyond the initial forms. > I don't understand the logic behind restricting who can develop for a system. It > can't be for quality control reasons: there are dozens of titles published by > big name companies that are so poor they border on fraud. Besides, Sony/Nintendo > have the final say as to whether or not a title meets their quality standards > and may be released. If there were too many developers, they'd be swamped. Also, the other risk is that development kits frequently are capable of pirating software, and they don't want the risk that their devkits will go to professional pirates. Also, I rather thought that the quality standards were more to do with not crashing the system and remaining compatible with the configuration than to do with the actual quality of the game. (I wish somebody would do that for the PC..) > I've heard people say that becomming a succesful games > company requires millions in capital and therefore it's not viable to allow > small companies to develop. This is begging the question, of course, because the main reason it requires millions in capital is that you'll have to pay four-or-five figure sums for EACH development kit, and that's before you've gotten the PC's to connect them to, or hired or trained the programmers, artists and musicians.. The big snag with the development of gaming technology is that so much more of game production is concerned with media production rather than programming. In Those Old Days, people like Minter, Crowther and Braybrook turned out games which were almost all based on design and programming. For the time, they did not have bad graphics, but that was only because at that time the graphics technology was not advanced enough to produce what we'd call good graphics nowadays. And as the technology got better, the graphics got better, and also got harder to draw. Now it's unlikely that you can make a game without employing artists. > Thankfully this is not yet true, but even > if it were, why would Sony or Nintendo care if a company failed while attempting > to create a game? My real thought on this is the "sheep factor". I mean, we know that lots of games we see suck, but there's two sides to the market: the very clueful who know exactly what they're buying, the slightly clueful area who tend to read up a bit more on their games and the sheep who will buy anything that looks like it'll appeal to them. It's important to the image of the console that if somebody just buys a random game off the shelf, that it displays good graphics, good sound and good use of the technology. Even if it's actually a bad game, it doesn't matter, it just has to look like a bad game *that is running on a good console*.