At this year’s Game Developer’s Conference a central mantra coming from the major console owners was that the next generation machines will be developer friendly. On Monday, Microsoft released XNA Studio which they claim will make it easier to develop for the Xbox 2 and no more expensive than current Xbox development. A little later Sony promised that Playstation 3 developers would have an easier time developing games for the new console. The Playstation 2, though a powerful box on its release, was notoriously difficult to develop for, which is a bit ironic since Sega’s dual CPU Saturn was doomed in part by the difficulty of development compared to the very developer friendly original Playstation. While Nintendo did not make any developer tool announcements at GDC, prior to the conference, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata turned heads by saying that Nintendo Revolution may alienate some 3rd party developers. That doesn’t sound very developer friendly on the surface, but the gist of what Iwata-san was saying is that the Revolution console is not going to be focused on making the prettiest graphics at the expense of the gameplay experience. In other words, developers won’t have to sweat the graphics (which is a pain and drives up costs), instead they can focus on innovative and fun gameplay which is often less toil and more fun for the developer. Game publishers more interested in glitz than substance may be turned off by that.
Despite Sony’s current dominance, could such overt efforts to make life easy for developers mean that some kind of parity has been reached? Sony isn’t likely to lose it’s big lead anytime soon, but the next generation race so far looks like anybody’s to win. Microsoft is even showing a threat in the Japan market by signing on Final Fantasy creator Hironubo Sakaguchi and other Japanese heayweights, and giving them a free creative hand on Xbox 2. In the end, this dogfight can only mean good things for the hearts of gamers, and bad things for their wallets!