Buster Friently wrote:
First off, there's way more to dealing with Microsoft or Sony than a "simple inconvenience". Keep in mind that both of those companies require that any hosted game run on their servers, in their ecosystem according to their rules, not CCP's. This is massive issue and reason enough to avoid it even if consoles were somehow on the same performance level that PCs are. Obviously consoles aren't at the same performance levels of PCs either, so that's a second issue.
The biggest reason to avoid consoles in the future, for CCP, is to avoid being held hostage by the walled gardens of providers like Sony and Microsoft.
There are also more subtle issues when dealing with consoles that somewhat defeats the idea that it may be easier to develop for consoles. It's true that when developing for PC, you have to consider a wide variety of hardware performance levels, but all of these differences are handled by standard APIs and libraries. Therefore, a developer doesn't have to account for different target architectures, for the most part, aside from providing a lot of options to the end users to tune graphics levels and other settings.
On the other hand, when dealing with the console world, any updates to a game in the walled garden of Microsoft or Sony has to go through those company's Q&A as well as CCP's own Q&A. Microsoft, at least, also dictates how many updates can be delivered in a given time period and how much data can be delivered.
Once again, it's no mere "minor inconvenience" it's a different environment completely. CCP will do well to simply avoid consoles completely in the future. If they want to try to capture new market revenue, mobile it the way they will probably go since VR isn't really taking off at the moment.
On the first point, well, just no. PSN/Xbox Live don't "force" you to use their servers. Their servers are only required for autentication purposes, and with obvious reasons. So, yeah, no need to say "damn PSN" when Tranquillity was down
. The only real point I see here is that if PSN/Live are down you cannot play.
API and libraries:
it's not that PS4/Xbox doesn't have any! Actually, they both have custom/semi-custom API and libraries and Sony's closely resemble Vulkan (in-depth from slide 32 on
http://develop.scee.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ParisGC2013Final.pdf). And by the way, APIs
won't help you if your shaders are too complex (just think like Parallax Occlusion Mapping on a terrain shader/material with no optimization) for a specific machine or if your drawcalls are too high.
In case you want hundreds and even thousands of the more or less same object on screen, lets say, pebbles or small rocks, you will probably want to instance those objects and HLOD the hell out of it. It has nothing to do with machine specifics, but more with design/optimization choices. The whole point here is that if your boundaries are uncertain, you won't risk breaking the game on half the PC builds simply because you went too far with a shader (and yes, I'm exaggerating, but you got the point). APIs won't help you if you want your game assets to be both med poly and on Xbox360. I mean, you could, but then you would expect incredibly "empty" rooms.
QA:
Well, yes. But as we console paesants have seen here, Sony QA usually just makes sure that your PS4 doesn't blow up while playing your game. It's not the kind of QA you would expect, for example, at CCP. And they reduced the time the whole process takes to a week or so, so it's not even the epic amount of time the community usually think of. But if a week is too much, then you're completely right.
The point I didn't see in your post, anyway,might be the main reason why (often minor) developers avoid consoles imo: costs. It is a pretty big and potentially risky investment, and you'd have to pay everytime you want to push out a patch. That's why I started my post saying that console development is both a plus and a minus. You must carefully plan your marketing and players expectations in order to not lose money from your game.