Aion Amarra
Minmatar
Real Nice And Laidback Corporation
Black Core Alliance
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Posted - 2010.07.18 20:08:00 -
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While this is not a direct response to much of what people complain about in this thread, I get the feeling that a lot of people are a lot more pessimistic about Dust514 being an XBox exclusive than they need to be.
This is just my pet theory, and wether I am right or not will only come to light roundabout a year after Dust is released, given the only sensible response to this from CCP is probably either saying "Incorrect", or ignoring it, no matter what the actual situation is, but:
I've seen it happen with a -lot- of Japanese XBox360 exclusives. A highly touted exclusive is released, people buy it, then -one year later- stuff pops up in a -considerably improved- version cross platform, be it PS3 or PC. That version subsequently ****es off all the XBox owners. Now, Japan has a very low XBox userbase, but even then, many games are made for XBox first, then ported later. Why is this?
Simple. Microsoft subsidizes games for the 360 under the condition that they remain 360 exclusive for a year. Sometimes with a considerable amount of money. I'm not sure if the practice is still in use now, given quite a few gamedevs have abused the policy, but given Dust has been in development for years, it's not too unlikely that a contract like that was signed years ago.
This is not even farfetched, given that a) CCP has relatively close ties to Microsoft, and b) the decision to make Dust console only seems hugely illogical.
So the end result may look something like this:
1. Dust gets released for XBox, it is hyped for a while.
2. After a while, hype slowly dies down, less people play the game due to short attention span of console users
3. DUN DUN DUN. Consideraly improved PC port of Dust appears out of nowhere. (Given it's unreal engine 3 based, a port afaik shouldn't even be too horrendously difficult.) The PI integration has now been properly bugfixed and iterated on, too.
4. At this point, the XBox version has lived through it's shelf-life anyway, barely any XBox users still play, so not too many people actually whine/get lost because PC gamers use 'keyboard/mouse easymode that takes all the skill out of aiming'. (Quotation marks for sarcasm here.)
5. PC version thrives, even though a probably significant fraction of the initial development money came out of microsoft's pockets, this way EVE players actually didn't pay as much as they thought they did.
6. ???
7. Profit.
Then again, I may just be too much of an optimist and be reading too far into this.
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