Summarily, you are making my point, again- you don’t see what would be in it for Capcom to not use a superior netcode, and therefore you assume that they have a good reason. Netplay has been terrible in fighting games for a decade, especially outside of Japan. Capcom’s current methods are clearly Japan-centric, and there are plenty of people across the globe who are fine with the way things are, and I don’t particularly fault them for thinking this way. It is not a matter of Capcom thinking their methods are better, it’s that they’re not convinced that they need to change anything. Why should they? Even if GGPO implementation went amazingly well, it requires Capcom to make an investment (financially, in terms of development time, etc) for what would seem to be a marginal improvement in quality, but not in something that would guarantee to make them any actual increase in revenue. If a new game might sell a million copies, is there any evidence that having netplay which is doubly accurate would make the game sell a million and one copies?
And with regards to the comments of official spokespeople at Namco, Capcom etc- what else would they be saying?
-“GGPO works better than what we have, but we’re not going to use it”?
-“We might use it later, but it’s too late in the development process so our next 2 games will have the standard, inferior netcode”?
-“We’re contractually obligated to this other company, so which product is better doesn’t really matter?”
This isn’t to say that there aren’t people who genuinely believe that the status quo is better, but under what circumstances would you expect developers to praise GGPO if they aren’t going to use it? To say that GGPO is incompatible with current hardware etc. is a political necessity in order to save face. The technology is untested commercially- if things pan out I would expect you to see it being used [even] more in newer games, or other netcode of a similar type.
