Does hardware influence software, or is it the opposite? Think about Oculus, the Psychomantis battle, and 3rd party peripherals.
although the indies are making a big push today I think the AAA titles are still the biggest and first party games are what drives sales. That being said the hardware and first party support (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) is essential in the game industry. Right now we see a real life example with Project Cars on the Wii U. The system can't support more that 720p with 26 fps which is drastically lower than promised, so they have said it is going to be released on Nintendo's next system (which we can all assume will be the NX). This proves that hardware and more importantly hardware capability is the driving force in the industry. – jakepavao9 years ago
One of the main reasons Oculus keeps getting delayed is that, at this point, there's not much you can do with it. They're bribing people to create Oculus-compatible games because you can put out the hardware, but if there's no software to go with it, it's just a paperweight. – Andie9 years ago
So, according to Andie's post, software does have a hand in driving the industry. Can anyone think of any specific games that were delayed to next-gen systems, whose hardware was designed - in whole or in part - to support those games? – Kristian Wilson9 years ago
As a PC gamer, it's difficult for me to see how software could possibly be driving the industry when games are constantly dumbed down or held back because of console limitations. My computer isn't exactly top-end, but even though I bought it over five years ago, until very recently I could run pretty much any multi-platform game at a significantly higher FPS count, with much better graphical quality, than either of the two big consoles (the Wii was an innovator, yeah, but after a time it became a bit of a joke as well due to its _lack of hardware_--something the Wii U also suffers from). But when the next generation of consoles came out, there was a sudden boom in the quality of games being released--still nothing top-end PCs couldn't outpace with ease, if given the chance, but enough to give us all a taste of what would happen if we didn't have to wait until Microsoft and Sony got their latest box out. – Snowskeeper9 years ago