| > Professionals, as in release AAA games. Term AAA is ambiguous. Please define it. If you mean publisher funded (a common meaning), then see above. If you mean big budget, then your remark about independent developers is invalid as well (there are independent studios with big budget games). Anyway, I don't see how any of that is related to professionalism. Funding method or budget size has nothing to do with it. > Of course there are production and development costs, like in any other business Yes, overcoming lock-in and duplication of effort add extra costs. That's exactly what I was saying above. It equally affects big and small budget projects, as well as publisher funded and independent studios. Saying they don't care about extra costs is simply ignoring the reality. > How the AAA game development industry works. Still ambiguous, but let's assume you mean AAA = publisher funded (since you contrasted it with independent studios before). Simple example - most legacy publishers don't even release games for multiple APIs (such as OpenGL), because of costs. I.e. they are hostages of lock-in. That exactly demonstrates the issue above, and the fact that it has a direct impact. So saying that no one cares about it (or no one is impacted by this tax on the indstry) is completely wrong. |
It is not how it works in the industry.
They focus on one platform, because game programming is more than the graphics API, the hardware architecture and OS are also part of the whole equation, and what means being able to extract every single byte and ms for a few extra FPS.
The talks done by Naughty Dog are a good example of how much it matters to be an expert on a specific platform.
Then they leave the ports to other game studios that specialize in porting to specific platforms, which is another way how money flows inside the industry.
There is a whole industry specialized in game ports since the days of Atari ruled the world.
A publisher that targets PC, XBOX, PS4 and Nintendo has already by definition supported 4 graphical APIs, not counting the additional OS and hardware differences.
You can shout to the windmills how much bad lock-in and duplication of efforts are, like it happened to Don Quixote, no one will care until you change the speech to the language and mentality that reigns in the game industry.
What matters is IP, licenses and getting the games into the hands of users.
The technology used comes a few bullet points down in the priority list.