good question.

Well, a good reason as to why YG exists in the first place is that this is clearly not the case in a great many games.

From a financial point of view it does not at all make sense for a game not to scale down. Which has to be compared to the associated cost of developing a wide range of hardware scaling and Q&A testing, along with production timetables - again, since that there are lots of games which don't scale particularly well it's clear that one financial issue is more significant than the other.

True - I guess I don't play many of those games. I've become the elitist gamer that only plays the best of the best / the games he likes most: I couldn't care less that average stinkypoo games like Chrome or Call of Juarez run at 10FPS at high details...

I guess it's mostly the smaller development studios who have a lot of trouble getting it all done. On the one hand they have to have the right technology to even be noticed, on the other hand they need scalable settings so their game's actually sold. The right combination is usually reached by the likes of Valve, id, Epic, CryTek but I can imagine smaller studios with less "oomph" have more trouble.


Anyway... Neeyik, if I were to express certain interest in freelance writing for YG along the lines of articles, opinions, industry insights and such... What'd you tell me?

http://www.futuremark.com/forum/showthread.php?t=31230

If you send a letter of application, including a current C.V. and if possible any samples of work (your thread over at YG is a good example) to careers@futuremark.com then we'll certainly consider you; please bare in mind though that I'm stuck at the GDC and won't have time to address it properly until next week and, not surprisingly, there are others that need to be done too.

A good thing to point out in the letter would be exactly what material you could produce, how often and what resources you have.

Thanks,
Nick