Sega’s Nagoshi discusses next-gen battle between Sony and Microsoft – “all-out war”

Sega’s Chief Creative Officer has begun discussing the next-generation of hardware, and it looks like his opinion is that the Wii U brings a different view to next-generation. However, the real battle will take place between Sony and Microsoft, and that’s something that will benefit developers.

Speaking with Famitsu, Toshihiro Nagoshi mentions that his view is that though the Wii U offers different hardware, the eventual battle is between Sony and Microsoft:

• When asked about what the next generation, Nagoshi sees an even more intense competition than in previous cycles, although it won’t come down to hardware speed. “They’ll be better-performing systems,” he said, “but I think they’ll start being closer and closer to each other on the inside. The Wii and Wii U are differentiating themselves on the hardware level, but the other two systems are going to wage an all-out war of services, one that’ll involve the entire Sony group and the entire Microsoft group. It’ll be a battle to see which group can leverage its scale to best benefit developers and gamers.”

• As he prepares to join this battle, Nagoshi doesn’t seem particularly concerned about rising development costs in the next gen. “It depends on the title, but we don’t picture development costs as massively expanding any longer,” he said. “As hardware grows more powerful, you can have that hardware cover more of the labor of running the game. There’ll always be room for polish, but after a certain point, you’re always running into limits in terms of the size of the media. I think pretty much all the AAA titles people know use up nearly all of the media space they’re given. In terms of selling price, in terms of the cost of things like multiple disc layers and the tempo of play, I don’t see development costs changing massively. They’ll be expensive, sure, and that is a concern to me, but even if the hardware gets ten times as powerful, games won’t suddenly get ten times costlier to make. I don’t think they’d even be twice as costly.”

The discussion about hardware pricing and game costs is particularly interesting considering recent rumors that next-generation games will cost the same amount as current PS3 and Xbox 360 games.

Thanks, Polygon.