How's My Driving: Xbox 360 Pros and Cons - Pros III: Ease of Development: Features

As games get more sophisticated, and thus more expensive to develop, publishers want their titles to be as easy to create as possible.

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Pros III: Ease of Development

One area that is going to be crucial in the next generation of consoles will be ease of development for the various platforms. The PlayStation 2 is often held up as an example of a very difficult console to develop for when compared to its contemporaries. Studios often have to work a lot harder to get their desired results on that system when compared to other consoles on the market. In the early days of the Xbox, many said it would have a distinct advantage since it was easy to develop for, but by the time Microsoft’s console hit the store shelves, the PS2 had such a large market lead, that publishers automatically favored that Sony system, and simply bit the bullet when dealing with any trials and tribulations that may come with developing for the Sony console.

Dead or Alive 4 for the Xbox 360 (Left), and Metal Gear Solid 4 for the PS3 (Right). They both look very nice, but which crushed more souls, and devastated more company coffers over the development cycle?

However, games for the next generation of consoles are going to cost significantly more to make, with some analysts predicting production costs to start at somewhere around $20 million. That being said, there’s a lot more money at stake this time around, and one has to wonder just how big of a risk developers and publishers will be willing to take on a console that is hard to develop for. The more time it takes to make a game, the more a company will likely have to fork out in order to produce it. Games were a lot cheaper to make this generation, so dealing with a tough

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console to develop for was a little easier to swallow. Considering the money involved now, though, it seems a lot more likely that ease of development will be a much bigger factor in what platforms new games show up on.

Already, some developers have commented on how the Xbox 360 is an easier environment to work with compared to the PlayStation 3. Tomonobu Itagaki has stated that this is a major advantage that the 360 has over the

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PS3, and he isn’t alone in saying this. John Carmack, creator of popular first person shooters such as Doom and Quake, seems to be of a similar opinion; especially after some of his comments during an address at QuakeCon this passed summer. Even Hideo Kojima, who has managed squeeze a lot of power out of Sony consoles in the past, has said that the Xbox 360 looks like a far easier platform to develop for.

The bottom line is going to be more important than ever this coming generation as production budgets soar. If the Xbox 360 proves to be significantly easier to develop for compared to the other next generation consoles on the horizon, Microsoft’s next console could have a distinct advantage in terms of developer support in the coming years.

Okay, so we've seen the Pros the Xbox 360 has going for it. Now let's look at the Cons.