What I am saying is that the glass ceiling for developing sims and complex games is no longer the hardware limitations but the cost of coding the software. Gamers cough if they pay more than £50 for a game whereas professional graphics packages cost £1000, a MIS system £20 or £30 grand and a bespoke database system for the police or the NHS a few £million with no guarantee it will work. Ok there are many more gamers willing to buy a game and only one NHS to pay for its own software but the amount of coding and the costs involved are probably not that different. If more gamers move to consoles because that is where they are happy as they cannot be bothered with complex PC based sims or the expense of hardware then the financial base contracts further shifting the centre of balance untile it all capsizes.
Is this all inevitable? One thing I wondered was if a development company or a consortium of software and even hardware companies could get together and produce a universal standardise game engine that was adaptable enough to provide the evironment for a whole range of games and be more future proof and expandable to meet hardware advances.
This would spread the cost of the underlying effects and physics of the game over many more units leaving the game designers to concentrate on the 3D modeling, and game play of their offerings.
Being standardised it would also mean 3rd parties could concentrate on producing more specialised stuff like a wider variaty of trees or buildings etc. and know that they could be used in any game using the engine as simple plugins.
The same engine could be used for flight sims of any era or epic motor races such as the Milli Miglia or Paris to Dakar Rally etc.
Would this ever be feasable or even desirable. I don't know.
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