Hi,
Just throwing out some thoughts about the hypothesis:
"No more than five software companies can develop games
that take full advantage of PlayStation 2's capabilities."
As has been mentioned, THQI's acquisition of GameFX may
put us in that "group of five" (assuming we accept this
statement).
Alternatively, often what happens as technology gets
faster/better is that you no longer have to be so clever
in order to squeeze out the most efficiency of resources
(i.e. back when the "big" network links were 56Kb/s,
protocol engineers spent considerable effort reducing
packet header overhead -- now ATM can blow 15% or so,
because it makes it possible to get 85% use out of
multi-gigabit/s links).
If i'm not mistaken, one of the amazing things about
about Doom (and it's pre-cursor, Wolfenstein), was the
amount of graphics action their engine got out of those
relatively slow chips (i believe i played wolfenstein
on a 386, and doom on a pentium 60).
So, an alternate conjecture is that (at some point)
throwing "big iron" at graphics will allow *more*
people to play (i.e. anyone who can do the basic math
needed for graphic rendering, and they no longer have
to come up with clever algorithms to optimize the
rendering).
On a related note, THQ is in Southern California where
much of the film industry's digital effects are done.
I've observed (through friends) shakeup in that industry
of late, and some of the digital tech-heads can end up
at places like THQ -- someone i know personally has made
this leap (although not to THQ). Hey, maybe I should
coerce some of my particularly clued cohorts to send
a resume to THQ ;-)
All things considered, I'm not too worried that THQ won't
know what to do with a boat-load of "lighted shaded polygons".
cheers,
steve |
