Can Open Source Save Hardware?

Culexus writes "Tom's Hardware has a interesting story about Open Source saving the hardware industry. Pretty good read all in all. Hopefully chip makers and vendors won't have to bend to the iron might of Microsoft any longer." Some good comments on how early-adopters and enthusiasts are being marginalized by the industry, too.

Comments

Open Source

[shoemakc]

I've just read the article 3 times and I have to ask; what part of it deals with open source? It's a TH article for christ sakes....are you slashdot editors just reading tag lines now?

Look guys, not everything MS does is an attack on open source. OS might be a threat, but it's hardly their only threat.

-Chris

Open Source Enabling Gaming Talent?

[r]

Now, if the Open Source movement sees its installed base of desktop users reach a critical mass, it can enable a new generation of game designers, who will be shut out of the existing game industry because there is nothing else for them there.

noble sentiment but, sadly, naive. open source will not help game designers. (to say nothing about leading the next hardware revolution!)

games are extraordinarily expensive to make, but the cost isn't driven up by software. modern games require a team of specialists to build or adapt the basic engine, a very talented team of artists to produce the graphic and sound assets, perhaps a team of level designers and scripters, and of course people responsible for high-level gameplay design - to say nothing of production, marketing, and other people on the business side of the fence. all these people bring their expertise into play, and that ends up being really expensive.

can open source help with this? no, not really.

suppose we live in the best possible world, where all of the software used in game production is open-sourced - all game engines, all physics and AI engines, all modeling tools, all graphics software, everything. even in that world, games would retain high production costs - because the cost of making games is not in the tools, but in using the tools to produce content. what's worse, our world isn't too far from that ideal world - many tools are already open-sourced or otherwise available (quake engine is free, torque is available for minimal costs, some modeling tools are free, etc). you could create a game today using only free tools. but revolutionary new games by garage designers are still nowhere to be found. again, this is not surprising. the cost of making new games is not in the tools, it's in the many man-years it takes to produce a polished game using those tools.

the days of shareware garage games aren't over - people will always enjoy simple games, as the success of snood and cell phone games demonstrates - but they have been permanently demoted to a secondary role in the industry. gamers want well-designed, highly-polished games, and are willing to pay for them. this is not a domain that open-source can assist or compete in.