Here's another interesting tidbit from another article in this months EGM... they are interviewing Sega's Yuji Naka, who is the primary man behind Phantasy Star Online, among many other great Sega games (including a little known title call Sonic the hedghog.. you might have heard of it). They're asking him his thoughts on the next wave of systems... and some of his comments come really close to speculation from some of the guys here, about the difficulty and cost of making games for the new systems. Since I have nothing better to do at work, I'll transcribe a bit for you guys
I threw a couple comments in there myself by the way in case you're wondering about the out of quotes parts:
EGM: "Are you excited about the next gen consoles debuting this year?"
Naka: " I think it is too early. The PS2 and GameCube..." (note he doesn't mention the Xbox... as you all know Xbox was a commercial failure in Japan) "are still both very good platforms. Personally, I don't want the next gen hardware to come out this early, because they will be very difficult and expensive to develop for. Seriously, it might take three times the effort to make one game. With next gen platforms, players will expect games to look as good as CG movies - it will be very difficult. It will be cool when you can play a game that looks like a movie, but there's no way a company will be able to make a game like that in one year.
If fans of a franchise have to wait three years for the next game, that will be a shock to them" Will it? we waited that long and longer for new installments of mario, Zelda, halo, much longer for Metroid, Final Fantasy... heheh well the list goes on and on, the point is lots of major franchises take 3 years to come with sequels. "People who like games want to play them more often these days. Like Half-Life 2 - it took five years to come out! What's next? Will gamers be willing to wait 15 years for a game (sequel)? [Laughs] The father will start programming a game, and he'll have to pass it on to his son to finish it after he dies. on PC right now, there aren't a lof of games being released like there used to be. I think the same thing will happen to consoles: It'll take a lot of time (and money) to develop a top quality game."