Silicon Knights On Gaming Consolidation, Standardization

Thanks to 1UP for their interview with Denis Dyack of GameCube developers Silicon Knights, as he discusses former product Eternal Darkness and forthcoming conversion Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Dyack advances the theory that "...you'll see more collaborations, you're going to see a lot of mergers with developers... When they standardized the movie camera in, say, 1950, all the movie companies that told good stories became dominant, the major players that we know now... The same thing is going to happen in our industry." He further suggests that standardization of gaming hardware platform is "inevitable", saying "commoditization of technology" is coming to games, and comments: "Nintendo as a group has always emphasized the content of games, because that's where we think the value is, and we think that's what will become dominant."

Comments

Re:Only when consoles can do everything

[DenisDyack]

Standards are good, but not until you get to the point where new things are not being made.

Intesterestingly, a standardation does not imply that the technology will not change/improve or progress. Take the movie camera as an example, it has improved greatly since the 1930s when the standardization occured.

If so where do we stop?

It will probably will probably never stop but I believe it will converge. This is the "perceptual threshold" I refer to.

Denis.