Casual gaming king PopCap is renowned for releasing its games on a wide variety of platforms, and prides itself on the fact that it tailors each game to a target platform's features and capabilities. While normally a smooth process, senior game designer David Bishop admits that developing for devices running Google's Android operating system has often been a struggle.
Carl Jones, director of global business development at Crytek, has said that predictions of a gaming future based in the cloud are unlikely to come to fruition until ISPs make improvements to network infrastructure.
In the unlikely event of today's consoles still driving the game industry in 2015, their reign will have endured for almost a decade - an unprecedented period of suspended animation for dominant videogame hardware. With the PC marching stubbornly on and handheld devices fast catching up, it's the licensed engine that's evolved the most. Games light enough to run on Xbox 360, flexible enough to port promptly to PS3, scalable enough to satisfy PC, and adaptable enough to spawn phone and tablet tie-ins cannot, by and large, afford to solve that conundrum from scratch.
I have an unusual job. At parties, introductions might go something like this:
Anon: “Hi, what do you do?”
Me: “I work in videogames.”
Anon: “You get paid to play games all day?”
Me: “Not really, I only get paid to watch people play games.”
Anon: “Sounds great. I’d like a job like that.”
What would it take to make a Formula 1 game photorealistic? Ten years ago, you could have started just about anywhere. Likely answers would include, but weren’t limited to: high-resolution textures, better surface simulation, motion blur, depth of field, bloom, virtual lens defects, realtime reflections, and the dynamic modelling of light and shadow. Nowadays, you only have to look at F1 2010 to know that we’re close, the gap coming down to the last of those factors. And tech demos like Epic's Samaritan for its Unreal Engine (pictured above), only prove it.