Tripwire Interactive decided to explain why they're bringing their highly anticipated, cooperative first-person shooter to Sony's home console. The most basic answer is that it's all about the money, but the other answer is that the hardware capabilities finally caught up to the software.
Over on the Tripwire forums, the president of the company, Ramm Jaeger, explained in detail why Killing Floor 2 would be coming to the PlayStation 4 and how the team is making it happen.
The first thing that gets addressed is the loyalty of the team toward the PC platform, with Jaeger stating...
“Tripwire Interactive are hardcore PC gamers and developers. We love the PC as a platform and have been championing it for years, even in the dark days of 2005 when all the press could talk about was how the "PC was dead." We've been very successful on PC selling million of games, and we've no intention of leaving the PC or relegating the PC to a "second class citizen".”
Jaeger notes that the upgrades to the home consoles – containing 8GB of beautiful GDDR5 shared RAM – has really helped the cross-platform porting appeal for developers who were previously, and strictly, PC only.
It's important to remember that despite a major upgrade over the PS3, the PS4 is still only about equivalent to a slightly-above mid-tier PC. A lot of the problems of the PS4 are housed in its exceptionally weak CPU, which was actually benchmarked with lower results compared to the PS3.
Even still, the GPU and RAM upgrade is enough to warrant the ports of popular titles that were previously exclusive to PC.
Jaeger also explains that a lot of the policies that used to restrict indies from making games on home consoles have been altered, paving a way for studios like Tripwire to dip their toe into the home console water...
“In the past when we looked into getting a game on consoles, we were told by the console manufacturers that we would HAVE to go through a big publisher if we wanted to get our games on their console. They wouldn't deal directly with an independent company. Now however, that has changed, and Sony has opened up the PS4 for independent developers like Tripwire.“
A large portion of the post also breaks down the rising cost of development. Unfortunately we don't actually get a breakdown of where the costs are going, but it's made in the post as a clear sign that newer games cost more... for reasons.
I really did want to see the breakdown of the numbers, though. I imagine a lot of it is in art assets and higher quality models? I'm not entirely sure but that's usually what gets the upgrade treatment in most games.
Nevertheless, it's stated that from a business perspective Tripwire stands to make a heck of a lot more money with a multi-platform title as opposed to a single-platform title.
And before dropping a link to the second part of the discussion, Jaeger points out that a lot of the staff at Tripwire still enjoy playing games on console, and it would be cruel to deprive console gamers of one of the more awesome cooperative titles due out this generation.
You can read up more on Tripwire talking to fans about porting Killing Floor 2 over to the PS4 by visiting the official discussion thread.
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