Former top man at Epic Games and brainchild of Gears or War, Cliff Blezinski, has spoken out in an interview about the current state of the industry that he pseudo-retired from. According to him, it's in "turmoil," the worst since the 1980s video game crash and that ultimately, he'll wait until the dust has settled before rejoining it.
The main problem he says, lies in the fact that all the main console makers use closed platforms. "I think Nintendo could possibly be faced with the situation of becoming a company that only makes software moving forward. I think Sony and Microsoft are about to come to major blows. But at the same time, people love playing games on their iPad. The PC is going through a wonderful renaissance right now. I think we're ready to do digital download games all the time."
One of the big advantages of the PC over the past few years, has been with the frequency of which patches, DLC and updates are released. Current-gen consoles have huge lead in times for developers that want to fix a bug or flaw, as well as large monetary costs - meaning smaller developers rarely if ever update their games. This needs to be fixed in the future Blezinski says.
"When Gears of War 2 launched and we found out that our netcode wasn't working right, it took us three months to get an update out," Bleszinski said. "By that time, the majority of users had moved on to the next game or had traded it in... All that red tape needs to be stripped away in order to create an ecosystem to allow for a product like Minecraft to actually happen on a console."
He also wants to see mods added as a feature for consoles, something that has been a staple of PC gaming for years.
We know a fair bit about Sony's next generation PlayStation 4 and what it'll offer, but with regards to this sort of red tape, it's unclear. Do you guys think it'll become easier to update and mod games on the next-gen of consoles, or will it continue with the closed system we have today?