In the second part of GameIndustry.biz's interview with Silicon Knights' president Denis Dyack, the Too Human producer muses on the lessons learned from working with both Nintendo and Microsoft. Dyack again expresses his disillusion with games which take too long to finish, but the most interesting tidbits concern his thoughts on an "over-saturated" games market:

From a content creation perspective, when a developer makes a game he wants everyone to play it. Why make something that's format-specific? With the consoles out on the market now, it's going to be really unpredictable as to who is going to do well. Nintendo has come out of nowhere, Microsoft has gotten off to a really strong start and great things are expected of Sony. But if the market gets evenly divided into thirds, who is that good for? Why force the consumer to buy three consoles?

Consumers are just going to get to the point where they only want to buy one. Look at Nintendo, it makes all of its money from games not hardware. It could get to the point where everyone just agrees on a unified console and everyone concentrates on making games for it. Would the average consumer be able to tell the difference between the 360 and the PS3?

As technology gets better the perceptual threshold of each console gets smaller and smaller. So the value of the consoles becomes less and less. When the value becomes close to zero, with all these costs into research and development into the hardware, why make it any more? Why not concentrate where the revenue is - on making games and content. Maybe this won't be the last generation of consoles, maybe there will be another generation after this. But there will be just one place to play games. Maybe it's the internet and everything becomes so vast that we're playing across a distributed network and a unified service.

Wolfwood via gamesindustry.biz »