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Salon on the XBox
ozric writes "Salon has a front-page story on the XBox. The writer says the thing will "devastate" the market for PC games, and claims that's a *good* thing due to all the problems of developing for the PC as opposed to a dedicated machine. A little pro-microsoft, but good reading nonetheless." Actually it says a lot of things worth thinking about (complexity and size of the existing PC gamer market, relative niches of existing gaming platforms, and even mentions the Indrema Linux console)
I don't want to start some sort of lame US vs. Japan thing, but the reason I play console games is because the games are Japanese in style and content.
For instance, the Final Fantasy series are an excellent example of this style that appeals to me. I also play the very American Diablo II and Quake, but when I want a deep involving, multi-layered moving story, I play the console RPGs.
It's also the same reason I prefer to watch Anime as opposed to the American spawned cartoon-crap (with the exception of the Simpsons of a few years ago and Futurama).
I don't want an X-box. I don't care much for American-style games.
If you read the article, PC games *aren't* popular. "Console games can sell a whole bunch more copies," says Keighley. "Console games like Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot have sold about 5, 8, million minimum. The biggest hit PC game will sell maybe 2 million copies. Half-Life is up at that number now. Myst has a bit short of 4 million copies after more than a half-decade." They may be somewhat shallow (although I would argue that good console RPGs are not less deep than their PC counterparts), but they are nothing if not popular.
Walt
I'm not a Microsoft employee, and God knows I get as pissed off as anyone by the general shoddiness of Windows but, in their defense, they face the same problem mentioned in the article that developers face, namely compatibility issues, except 100 times worse.
If you try to design a game/OS that supports every known keyboard, mouse, monitor, video card, sound card, joystick and fucking VR helmet known to man, you're going to have to make compromises, cut corners, generally throw the Tao of Programming out the window and kludge together what you can.
This is never the case for a console. It won't have a separate graphics/sound card; it'll be made by one company and it'll be integrated right into the motherboard. If the HD is replaceable it will be specially made for the X-box and it will plug in as easily as a games cartridge. There is no need to make it conform to any more than one standard, ditto kb/mouse/control pad design, just like the PSX, DC and N64. The only PC thing about it will be the motherboard which would work just fine if it wasn't for all the stoopid peripherals stuck onto it.
In short, everything will be far more simply/uniformly designed and will be as likely to crash as any other console, ie, just about never.
Having said all that, I still wouldn't buy one because I don't fancy lugging X-box + hi-res TV around my pal's house if I want a game of lag-free multiplayer [insert FPS of choice here].
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
However, from a console point of view I would like to see more Japenese firms developing for it. It is unlikely that something like Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2 will be ported to it any time soon and this is the sort of killer app it needs.
It appears that it will be technically easier to code for than a PS2 which should see a large number of games released for it quickly. Of course, as with all consoles, the real question is will you want to play them? If they are just going to be PC ports then the only benefit will be the ease of use...
The lack of a back catalogue doesn't really bother me since very few people go and buy a cutting edge console just to play the same old games.
The hard drive appears to be something of a nice touch but am I going to have to schedule a cleanup defrag every month?
I dunno, maybe I'm just jaded with Sony at the moment. With any luck, there will be enough room for both players and we'll see better games as a consequence.
"Nintendo has traditionally done really well with a particular type of consumer," says Bachus. "Six-to-12-year-olds, let's say. Younger gamers ... We're going after an 18-year-old guy away at college for the first time. That's who the Xbox customer is going to be."
well, what about myself and others who have stopped smoking pot and playing games at 4 in the morning? This obviously is not a Microsoft supported statement about the X-Box, but I found it interesting. Do you think that Microsoft has realized that there is a hard-core gamer population that is out of college or do you just think the guy who said this is an idiot?
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
Why is that?
The inputs are such an integral part of the equation and are what keep me coming back to PC games. I know that they are not as fancy as graphics and sounds, but they play as much a part in game design, if not more, because they dictate the type of interface that you can build, which in turn dictates the type of game mechanics that can be built, which THEN determines the presentation bells and whistles (of course, that's purely theoretical, as most games just follow a successful formula and therefore only concentrate on bigger badder graphics with a few minor twists on the interface/control scheme).
Until consoles provide more than the Joypad/Analog Stick/8 Button environment, then they will always be severely retarded compared to PCs in terms of the variety of gaming experiences that they can deliver. You will get fighters, platformers, menu driven random combat-fest "RPGs" with no character interaction, puzzlers, and drivers. The other hugely successful gaming genres: First Person Shooters, Real Time Strategy, and Massively Multiplayer RPGs, will remain the domain of the PC until such time as controls better suited to their application appear on the console (namely the keyboard/mouse combination).Yes I realize that SEGA is doing some MMORPG based on Phantasy Star (one of their earlier console RPG hits), but try to imagine for one second how hard it's going to be for the palyers to communicate with one another without a keyboard. What will make this a compelling experience, beyond what is already capable on a console, if the players can't easily communicate with one another?
I also realize that GoldenEye is a great console based FPS, but it dosn't come close to replicating the feel of Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, or QuakeX. Furthermore, when the console FPS crowd eventually go online, they'll have to remain in their own server spaces simply because they won't have a hope in hell against keyboard/mousers. The same thing goes for RTS games.
Sure, inputs might be the simplest of balances to rectify, but how come they NEVER discuss this topic? It's always about graphics and blah blah blah. So what! All you'll get is better looking versions of games that you already own. And forget about cross-platform development of PC and console games on the X-Box if they do not support similar control options.
All this grief just adds to the fact that by the time X-Box, GameCube, and the PS2 are released, PCs will be 2 generations ahead technologically... which is all anybody cares about anyways it seems.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
I can rattle off lots of processors that are more efficient than x86 (RISC processors such as PA-RISC, MIPS, SPARC, DEC Alpha ARM, etc.)
Most of these processors aren't appropriate for a gaming platform.
PA-RISC, SPARC, and Alpha chips are workstation-class and priced accordingly. They'd cost at least as much as the retail price of your console - not something you can use.
ARM chips have horrible FP performance (the older versions didn't even have an FPU). This is a deliberate design trade-off; having only integer operations lets you save a lot of silicon and a lot of power. But gaming consoles need floating-point big time for physics, 3D collision detection, and any transformations that aren't handled by the hardware (there will be many). So this too is not something you can use.
MIPS chips would be an acceptable choice - if you license the core and fab your own chips. But this is expensive, and leads to more effort required in the motherboard design as well. You can do this if you're a console company and are optimized for it - but Microsoft isn't on either count.
So Intel looks like the best choice for Microsoft just from a price and design effort point of view.
remember NT came out originally for MIPS, Intel and Alpha. Mips and Alpha are long gone
And this is another *VERY* big reason for Microsoft to use Intel chips - they don't need to rewrite their operating system from scratch for a new platform. That would take a horrific amount of work, especially since they're porting DirectX as well as the OS itself.
A gaming console must do one thing and it must do it well, which screams RISC to me
Modern CISC-ish processors are just as efficient. Instruction decoding is a little hairier, but that's pretty much a solved problem. This is the old "CISC decoder with a RISC core" description that you've been hearing for both Intel and AMD chips (not precisely accurate, but close enough).
The big flaw in Intel chips is that it has few general-purpose registers, but so far the chips have held up without a vast performance gap.
I've read the article over at Ars on the Emotion Engine and it looks like if software developers can get their heads around it, the Playstation 2 should lay waste to the Xbox.
The Playstation 2 is nice, but still have a few serious design flaws. The fact that it has only a miniscule amount of frame buffer memory is the most obvious of these, but I'm a bit skeptical of the bus as well.
Realistic performance figures that I've heard for the Playstation put the X-box ahead (not surprising, as it has a graphics chip that's a couple of generations later than the Playstation, due to a later release date).
Software optimization *should* be a solved problem if Sony writes or has written, say, an OpenGL implementation optimized for their hardware.
I'm not a big fan of the X-box, but I'm afraid that I disagree with several of the points you use in your argument against it.
Obviously Xbox and the state of the art in PC game hardware will differ more and more as time goes by. But assuming that Microsoft will be successful in the initial Xbox marketing push (and I have no doubt they will), the market will be filled with millions of boxes with this static hardware/software combination.
After that, I believe that the supply of games that require more than what Xbox has to offer (in terms of hardware/software) will dry up for a long, long time.
I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a game industry executive for a second. You are developing a PC gaming title with a fixed development budget. Do you want to include or exclude an installed base of, say, 10 million Xboxes from your target audience? Do you want your title to be compatible or incompatible with the Xbox?
I thought so.
Marko Karppinen
First of all, OF COURSE it makes sense to use an Intel CPU, and a system close to a current PC. Developers can make games RIGHT NOW, without the final hardware, using the exact same tools they'll use for their final build, even though the GPU is not burned in silicon yet, and even though no boxes with the finalized spec actually exist yet. We can use MSDS and all the tools we're familiar with on a PC right now, and never have a porting headache at the end. That's a good decision.
As for the so called stagnation, it's misleading to suggest that as technology improves, entertainment improves. Better special effects have not made dramatically better movies. Casablanca, no CGI there, yet one of the best movies made. Likewise, a lot of people will agree that DOOM, a far less technologically advanced game than the Quake series, was a better game than it's successors. Hell, the Infocom interactive text adventures are still listed as favorites by millions worldwide.
A fixed platform with as much power as the X-Box will allow a HUGE number of developers already familiar with Win32 development to jump into creation with only the slightest learning curve for any platform specific differences. Furthermore, with the power available, even when "latest and greatest" chipsets that follow allow for more special features and polygons, XBox developers will be encouraged to work more on the story, the plotline, the involving drive that draws the players into the game, and this will result in better games for years to come.
But what the hell do I know? I'm just a game developer.
Sure, console games have some advantages. They're faster and smoother and don't crash. And the only ones who can write them are the big companies and software developers. Anyone ever hear of an open-source or shareware Playstation game? I didn't think so. Beware!
"Property is theft, therefore theft must be property, right?"
Hard drives and Windows are both notoriously prone to failure.
I'll have you know that my Windows 2000 box has an uptime of 3 years, and my box running the yet to be released Windows ME has an uptime of 1 year.
Allright, think about it.
XBox = Microsoft. Microsoft = American company.
Nintendo, Sony = Japanese companies.
Now, where are all the console game developers? Japan! Hm, think we're likely to ever see Squaresoft, Capcom, Komani, etc developing for the Xbox? It isn't likely. They do all the developing over in Japan, then, if they feel like it, translate and localize 'em for us english speaking folk... and I just can't see the XBox having a strong presense in Japan, so what's the point in these companies developing for MS's box?
BTW, AFAIK, those companies are already developing for the PSX2, so unless they switch over to the GameCube, the most that the XBox can hope to do is coexist with Sony.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
This is yet another story that Doesn't Get It.
... putting that into perspective, do you *really* believe the hype in this article?
I was talking with a buddy who does PS2 stuff at EA about this, and he pointed out that all this stuff about Xbox being a good console compatible with PC platforms is nonsense.
Is MSFT going to stop improving PC APIs all of a sudden when Xbox comes out? Are card makers going to stop improving their video cards? No? Well then. How long are the platforms ACTUALLY going to remain compatible?
Six months at most is what he gives it, which sounds not unreasonable. That means your window for doing combined Xbox/PC development is one year, at the outside, starting right about now.
And when you take that away, what's the Xbox? A pretty good gaming PC, for now. A mediocre gaming PC, when it comes out, not really up to the consoles that will be out at the time like the Dolphin, er, GameCube. And in another six months, a legacy platform.
Now
I've read the article over at Ars on the Emotion Engine and it looks like if software developers can get their heads around it, the Playstation 2 should lay waste to the Xbox. Nintendo's Dolphin (or whatever it's going to be called this week) also looks tight with it's PPC core. x86 has been looking tired for several years now and I can't imagine a high-performance graphics machine should be based on it.
To me, it seems M$ is shooting itself in the foot using an Intel processor considering that the leverage they will get from any installed base will be small given that gamers are used to buying a different architecture each time they upgrade. The fact that so many developers already design games for Windows may help though.
In summary, I think going with Intel may be a serious technical gaff but we'll have to wait and see if it will be a marketing win. As much as we may dislike M$, they are smart.
I don't.
The argument for royalties is that it allows the console price to be lower, allowing more units to be sold, and theoretically allowing you to sell enough more units to offset the royalty.
The downside is that if a large chunk of the console revenue must be derived from software royalties, it must be made impossible to bypass the console company in the production of a title.
This forces them to resort to various copy protection and registered developer schemes, which open the door to all the back room scheming between publishers and the hardware vendor about shipping sequencing, and content aproval.
I would rather have a console that was six months less powerfull, but 100% completely open, and that anyone could press games for.
(Indrema has not disclosed me on their hardware.)
John Carmack
The article focuses on the fact the X-Box is so much better than Windows, easier, with less configuration problems, etc. And if Windows didn't suck so much, we wouldn't need the X-Box.
My question is, why should we pay Microsoft more money to replace something of theirs that should be perfectly capable of dealing with what we demand of it?
Does anyone else see the screwed logic in this?