I'm going to tear a page right out of the Book of Optimus and say: Wow, that reminds me of the CG Forza 2 trailer. Looks amazing. I can't believe the Xbox 360 is capable of these things :D!

How was that?

*Puts on the Heretic Cloak*

hahahaha LEBATOwned.

True, but your impression could have been better -- you could have picked something less impressive to praise highly ;)

Now can we please pretend to be nice?

A couple of points.

Bizarre aren't a 3rd party, at least with regards to PGR :) MS have this particular franchise locked up very nicely.

They do share technology. A guy from Turn 10 is over there now and the PGR.TV system was the basis of Forza.TV . Sure, they should have shared a hell of a lot more! But it does happen.

I'd love MS to snap these guys up and now they've opened an MGS office in Reading, London, I wouldn't be suprised to see them pick up at least one more European studio. It doesn't always make sense though...there would be no point buying Bizarre if then half the guys up and left because they wanted to stay independent. Lionhead worked because they were looking to get picked up.

These shots look OMGWOW but they're going to be photomode shots, guarenteed. That in no way should detract from their quality but if you have a stunning photomode app in your game, of course you'll use it for screens!

Besides, I've a hunch you might get a closer look at this next week anyway ;)

Deft, Bizarre Creations is a 3rd party. They are an independant studio.

Project Gotham Racing (TM) is a Microsoft trademark -- MS is the owner of the franchise. They contract BC to develop the franchise and MS inturn publishes said titles.

At any time MS could hand development of PGR to another studio.
At any time BC could pass on future development of the PGR franchise.

On the buyout front, I am not actually suggesting a buyout. I would suggest investment. I would like MS to take a minority stake, e.g. 30%, of BC and couple that investment with a significant cash infusion.

The goal of this would be multifold:
1/ Maintain BC independance and control as a developer as well as oppurtunity for growth and internal profits.
2/ BC tap directly into MS's vast internal resources, both technical and financial.
3/ Stabalize MS's studios/development talent; BC enter an exclusive arrangement (similar to former Rare-Nintendo and Insomniac-Sony; i.e. the fabled 2nd party)

On technology sharing... anything happening right now is pretty shallow, which you agree with. But what I am suggesting is a little deeper.

MS has a number of racing franchises: PGR, RC, FM. There may be more -- with the FF wheel MS has made their stake on the racing genre this generation.

It is a waste of resources to have co-development of nearly identical technology on multiple titles, especially when there is talent disparity in the market. On the wasting front... Made up numbers for arguements sake...

PGR4
=> 20 man years physics dev time
=> 40 man years renderer dev time
=> 100 man years car models
=> 20 man years terrestrial vegetation
=> 100 man years building models
=> 10 man years audio

FM2
=> 30 man years physics dev time
=> 20 man years renderer dev time
=> 100 man years car models
=> 50 man years terrestrial vegetation
=> 50 man years building models
=> 10 man years audio

There is significant overlap in development. Pooling the top resource talents from each of the teams to build rich, yet flexible "MGS Racing Middleware" could go a very, very far way.

Obviously each of the titles will need tweaking and individual development. But lets take the renderer for an example. You have 40 PGR4 years and 20 FM2 years for their renderers. Let assume each title will take 10 man years for franchise customization for their design goals and needs; thus there is 40 hours of combined renderer development -- from the BEST talent of all studios -- and 10 additional years of focus. The quality will be higher due to talent, but more importantly a game like FM2 gets more talent in a weak area of development -- nearly 3x as much man years.

And vice vera: The spot on FM2 physics could be even better and migrated downstream to other titles.

Basically the best of all worlds is available to al dev teams. This means higher quality across the board, faster development cycles, and less wasted resources. The last point on resources means this: More time spend on NEW features rather than recreating the wheel.

PGR4 and FM2 are not all entirely different. There are some divergent design goals, but the core concepts and technologies have HUGE overlap. And any differences can be compensated by re-engineering because of the huge amount of time saved on quality tools aimed at content creation. Just sharing source assets for cars, tracks, and art assets would be a huge time saver 0_o No more, "Not enough time for cabin view" excuses!

You don't want BC to lose dev talent -- that is a concern, hence no buyout and instead a financially rewarding situation for BC. But as well as the UE3 engine works for dozens of titles, making an internal racing engine for 3-5 games with shared assets and resources would be very, very nice.

And it would resolve the issue of deficiencies in a number of studios -- and open the door for more quality titles to be developed. With quality tools you can actually fund new studios which, while smaller, have the dev tools of a HUGE racing developer and take a risk on making either new titles or more "niche" products like RC.

Game let me touch you.

I think Bizarre is best off as an indy developer.. but I'd like to think that we're all better off as gamers if studios are allowed certain freedoms that they'll only see in that sort of position. Then again, MS sized funding never hurt anyone.

The point was that this is a 3rd party relationship. They have the right to do those things. And history tells us eventually this will happen unless their relationship changes. Very few companies continue investing in an IP owned by another company after 10 years.

Anyhow, BC is a 3rd party. If PGR4 doesn't sell much better than PGR3 and MS wants them to work on PGR5 BUT BC thinks another internal title could sell better don't be surprised if BC moves on. PGR3 sales were dissappointing for what it was to the 360 launch.

Last time I checked with accurate updated numbers (which was many months ago) it wasn't above 500k sales. That was like late last summer, but typically games don't sell large amounts of units after their first 3 months Maybe being bundled for $30 with FM1 boosted sales (I don't have any numbers on that) but even then their return on sale is really, really low at that point.

Definitely wrong. There are well over 500k users listed on Mygamercard.net and that's only got 1.5m users registered out of 10m. I would suggest PGR3 being part of a bundle, plus the wheel, plus the FM2 tie-in gave this a pretty hefty boost in sales. It still pops into the UK charts every now and again so new 360 owners seem to pick it up still.

Well over 1m worldwide easily in my opinion, if not that in the US alone.

Good points. I have not tracked software sales since last summer, so I don't know. But the "1M" lists floating around still don't list PGR3. I HOPE it sold really well though.

The historical trend is 8x in memory footprint. e.g.

N64/PS1 had about 4MB
PS2 had 32MB + 4MB VRAM
PS3/360 have 512MB (+10MB eDRAM on 360)

1GB would be a mere 2x jump.

Anyhow, with the state of PC games 512MB of dedicate video memory is rare and games that make good use of it rarer. Bash the consoles Inflatable, but you ignore the advantage of a known, dedicated pool of memory. You know on the 360 what resolution the game will be at, how much memory every user will have, etc. The PC doesn't. Further, the PC wastes memory like no tomorrow. Not only is the OS and such bloated (my fresh XP install after boot has over 350MB of stuff in memory!) but there is mass duplication of content in games. So you have 2GB of system memory and 512MB of video memory... unfortunately your system memory pretty much mirrors the video memory.

PCs are general purpose with high level management, thus wasteful. With the target GPU on most *new* games having 128MB of memory very few games are utilizing the memory footprint that new GPUs offer at 512MB and 1024MB.

Part of the problem with a lot of games is they are essentially PC ports to the consoles and do a craptastic job of memory management. On the 360 you cannot be wasteful as on a PC and you do need to manage your caching more logically -- you cannot tell the consumer, "Stop whining and get a Raptor, 4GB of memory, and a $800 GPU". There is also texture bandwidth -- you get peak 22GB/s for this (buffers are on the eDRAM unlike a PC GPU... same solution on the PC as before: Either lower your settings or buy a GPU with a boatload of wasted bandwidth).

But when designed for it looks great. I can think of a number of games with nice texturing. BFBC for one.

When you recycle your game engine, like CoD2, for console usage, yeah, craptastic.

As for PGR4, sorry... name 1 PC racing game that looks like this:



Games are not perfect. No game, PC or Console, at this point has perfectly high resolution textures across the board. None. All have artifacts.

But as of 2005 PGR3 is head and shoulders above EVERY PC racer in graphics.

Pretty lame that the PC in a 2 year time could not pass PGR3. Heck, according to you, the 360 was old/underperformed to 1337 PC hardware when it shipped.

So where are all the killer street racers blowing PGR away?

As a PC gamer (which many of you remind me of regularly enough) it isn't that I hate the PC, only that I recognize all the epenis bragging about PC's potential almost always overlooks: a) the downside of the open and messy infrastructure and b) the business model and pace of PC development doesn't align with the potential vision people hype it for.

PC gaming IMO validates itself not in cutting edge hardware but in open, social networking; modifications; a variety of excellent input devices catering to specific game types; and a wider selection of unique games including arcade games as well as indy style productions. I like the fact I can find "smart" games, even "smart" action games on the PC. Not every PC game has to target mainstream 1M sales success.

The number of games that ran effeciently on my 6800GT is... woeful. The resource model on the PC as well as programming model pretty much negates many of the hardware benefits. In theory the 6800GT isn't too far behind the 360 GPU (16 texture units @ 400MHz, 32GB/s of bandwidth, 16 wide Pixel shaders and 6 dedicated vertex shaders, SM3.0, 256MB of dedicated memory) but comparing something like FEAR on the 360 to FEAR on the PC is... eye opening.

Graphically, I wouldn't touch the PC version. Of course online and KB/MS, the x factors, make up for decent hardware outputting crappy performance.