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Microsoft's Real Plan For XNA Gaming Domination?
h0tblack writes "While many have heard about the XNA 'game software development platform' from Microsoft's announcements at GDC earlier this year, the full scope of their plans are only just becoming clear. Eurogamer has a surprisingly candid interview with J Allard covering the latest plans from Redmond. XNA isn't a rehash of DirectX tools for the Xbox2, PC and WinCE devices after all, it's a full-on assault on the gaming world, with the prize being complete dominance of the market. The site also has a BitTorrent of the interview, since it was originally recorded in video form."
Micrsofts plan is a "complete dominance of the market." This is new...
Because, you know, speculation about Microsoft taking over the world is sooo 90's.
Now is the time, if any, for people to start making games work in Linux as best as possible. If something isn't done soon, all the gaming manufacturers will start building games to work with this system and make them completely unusable in Linux.
Before the Xbox was released, Microsoft tried to sell Sony a development kit that would allow Sony (and their 3rd party developers) to develop games on a standard platform.
;).
If you read the book "Opening the Xbox", Bill Gates was pretty irritated and confused when Sony turned them down flat. Why would they turn down Microsoft? Oh, sure - it would also make these games easier to port to a MS based system in the future - but MS was trying to help Sony!
Anyway. Sony saw through the game. And while XNA might be the greatest thing in the world to folks who want to port games between the Xbox, the PC, the Pocket PC - it's probably not something that Sony and Nintendo give a big rats ass about.
That's not to say that Microsoft's plan is a bad one. When Thief III comes out, I'll probably get the Xbox version. I've got a Pentium 800 as my old "game" machine, and I haven't turned it on for about 6 months now (I made the OS X switch some time ago). The Gamecube, PS2 and Xbox let me play what I want and I don't have to spend $300 - $600 every 12 months to keep up my video card/ram/processor/motherboard/whatever.
MS probably realizes this; I'm willing to bet their seeing higher Xbox sales on Xbox/PC titles (such as Knights of the Old Republic). So for games, I'll expect to see more of their emphasis to the Xbox.
Which is kind of a problem - it's still a major money loser for MS. It could be a winner in the long run, but will that means they'll have to open it up a bit and start letting people use it as a PC like system, which could eat into their PC sales profits? That could be a dual edged sword, since that means people could get used to using a "console" as a computer.
Eh. Either way, I'll just keep my eye on the situation. The best games will rule (which looks to be Nintendo for the next 9-12 months, with some nice looking gems on the other platforms), and I'm not about to give up my Powerbook any time soon
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The article's author hints that Microsoft's XNA will almost be a "gaming OS". A set of standards that various consumer electronic companies can build consoles for.
This will bring to console gaming the unreliability of the Desktop PC. An often cited benefit Apple has over the PC platform is that it knows its hardware. There are no wild cards. Console game developers have been able to count on this until now. You test and test, on a given company's box and you know your good.
If XNA takes off, look for crashes, due to one Manufacturer cutting corners, or another trying to add a beefier new edition of some chip.
There are some things where standards are great, and being able to commoditize the hardware is a great benefit to consumers. On the other hand gamers, who as a whole have demonstrated a willingness to spend for top of the line systems every few years are probably not looking for a less expensive systems at the cost of quality.
No doubt odds are in favor of something like this winning the mass market. In the mass market, the commodity item always succeeds, VHS over Meta, PC over Mac, etc. _However_, one of the console system may yet survive this if they can succeed in filling a niche in for a superior gaming experience that only a few percent of the market care about and build a fiercly, loyal following. -- Just as Apple Computers exists today.
--Aaron Greenberg
Microsoft has tried to revolutionize the gaming world through radical software redesign once before, in the mid-to-late 90's, with a project called Talisman. Microsoft had assembled a team of CG scientists that ripped the heart out of the industry, and they put them to work on this project.
The idea of Talisman was that each frame of a game is very much like the next one. In fact, rather than render the next frame from scratch, it might be possible to do projection of the previous frames image to get the next frame. Even if this couldn't be done for the whole image, it could certainly be done for part of it. For example, in a flight simulator, even if the ground is not flat, it is piecewise flat, and those pieces could be 2D-transformed from one frame to the next without the expense of full 3D rendering.
Microsoft hired the best people in the field of DVE (digital video effects) including Steve Gabriel and Alvy Ray Smith, almost certainly to work on this project. Steve Gabriel built the Ampex ADO, the first high-quality digital video effects machine, in the early 80's. Alvy Ray Smith wrote the Siggraph paper on 2-pass transforms, the foundation upon which the ADO is built.
Well. It turns out that rendering texture-mapped polygons can be done very very quickly indeed, and the analysis necessary to "save" time using the Talisman ideas was exceedingly complex and expensive. In the best case, Talisman might have sped things up by a factor of 2 -- about six months time given the fervid pace of graphics board development.
I don't think of this as particularly reassuring, though -- Microsoft usually fails a couple of times before achieving domination. Perhaps Talisman was Rev 1, and XBOX is Rev 2...
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I can't see why Microsoft are going to charge extortionate fees or demand additional royalties for using something like this. Look at the model for Visual Studio. Does it make development easier? Yes. Do MS expect royalties from distributables? No. Does it tie you in to using Windows? Yes. The purpose of XNA is to make it easier for people to create games on Microsoft platforms. MS then make money on the OS or, in the case of consoles, from the sale of the game itself (just like Playstation get money from every PS game sold). Seems pretty transparent to me and hopefully good news for the smaller development studios.
1) How would it be different from Windows? If it's just a set of standards, protocals, and software that can run on a ton of different types of hardware, how exactly is it different from Windows, or Linux? Is the console release cycle replaced by incremental PC-style upgrades? If so, I'd have to mark that has a huge disadvantage. I do not want to have to upgrade my console system. I don't particularly that every 2-5 years I drop another $150-200 on a new console and peripherals, if I don't have to spend $500 and build an entire machine every several years. The beauty of console systems is that they Just Work, no having to check "system requirements", no driver conflicts, ect. Far from creating a "standard" for developers to follow to improve game stability, ect., they now are encouraged to write code that may run on multiple platforms.
2. Do we really need to play Halo on a cellphone, hand-held game console, PDA and refridgerator? For some games I could imagine that having some functionality/interaction with the actual game would be nice, but I would fear this would become a serious distraction to developers who often seem to have a difficult time just creating a single stable, fun game. Even with a set of "standards" being introduced, it's more work for the developer to build the kitchen sink into their game. I question how many gamers would actually have the time and inclination to take advantage most of these features... is it going to increase sales of games that much? I fear it could eat into developer resources that should be spent creating a good game. It shouldn't be that hard to develop a good game for a three different platforms as long as each of those platforms don't vary in terms of hardware or software configuration at all (as is currently the case.)
3. Do we really trust Microsoft to do a good job? Microsoft has a poor track record for producing stable and secure products. Though I've been skeptical of the idea of trojans, ect. that spread through gaming consoles up until now, I would not be surprised if in several years we saw a worm reap havoc because too many people didn't run "XFS Update" often enough.
4. Is this legal? Microsoft is a monopoly. DirectX is a part of Windows, which is essentially the subject of their monopoly. Outright admitting that they are attempting to dominate the market with a standard that they own, and using their existing "clout" with DirectX, ect. seems to me to raise a few red flags. What I find ironic is the guy talks about the consumers not having a choice--since when has that ever been a concern of Microsoft's? And I do think I have a coice. For console systems, I can choose a GameCube, or a PlayStation 2, or an X-Box. On any of those systems I can choose from a multitude of games from a multitude of developers. Or I can choose to game on a PC (which I can build myself or buy from any number of OEMs), running Windows or Linux. Or I can choose to game on a Mac. Is this not choice? If a substantial number of these options were replaced by XNS, just how is my choice broadened? I do not understand.
Not really trying to be a Microsoft basher, but I'd be expressing some serious doubts even if it were Nintendo (and I'm something of a fanboy) proposed something like this. The fact that it's Microsoft makes me even more skeptical.
Renderware is billed as a "universal game engine", more or less. Actually, it's the physics engine from Mathengine, an AI engine from Knyogon, a rendering engine, and an audio engine, which more or less play together. There's also a generic level editor, a build tool, and a configuration management system for all the game assets. All the major target platforms are supported.
In general, none of those components are considered the best in their class. When you look at the titles supported, you don't see any of the top 10 games. But there are time-to-market advantages in buying them all your tools from one vendor. That's the sort of thinking that attracts Microsoft.
So if you want to see what XNA would be like, check out Renderware.
You're wrong. It is not difficult to create 3D programs in Linux. Just use SDL or ClanLib and you're set. It is in fact just as easy as programming OpenGL in Windows. I'm doing this right now, coding OpenGL stuff in Anjuta, and it is doing very well. And, I have a Radeon 9600...
As for 3D hardware audio, you may be right. However, I dunno how the ALSA support for this is.
And, it is not true that DirectGraphics is light years ahead. See the features of OpenGL 1.5 and compare it with Direct3D9 - there is no "better" one, it's a draw.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Don't you understand? In Playstation vs. Xbox vs. GameCube, Playstation II sales are 71.3million, Xbox at 13.7million, and GameCube at 13.9million. With 75% market share, most developers are interested in getting their titles on the Playstation platform first, and Xbox or GameCube or both second. But when MS brings out the next version, the developers are presented with this option: Develop your game for the Xbox, and it's also ready for Windows! So now instead of looking at Xbox vs Playstation market share, they're looking at Xbox + Windows vs Playstation. And with Windows XP alone at 210 million units sold, the tables are quickly reversed on Sony. This is Microsoft yet again leveraging their monopoly on the desktop to beat the competition, instead of developing a truly superior product.
Where have you been for the last decade.
MS will do ANYTHING it can to defeat the competition. And it will use any cludge, any leverage, threat or intimidation to do so. I didn't see anything in that article implying that XNA will be a free and open standard that anyone can use without permission.
Wanna bet the license fees will be under NDA and depend on how nice you are to MS and if you have any naughty ties to MS's competition.
Previously:
Oh My! You want to sell computers with linux/beos/etc pre-installed? Shoot, looks like we'll have to renogotiate your license agreement.
New and Improved with XNA:
Oh My! You want to release a linux/mac/etc client with your game? Shoot, looks like we'll have to renogotiate your license agreement.
Unless XNA becomes independent of MS, it will eventually be used as a weapon. This IS about domination.
Fr0dicus meet sarcasm, sarcasm, fr0dicus. I'll leave you two to get acquainted.
Could of course be that they think their is a market, there isn't, could be they think it will win them customers, it doesn't. OR just maybe these companies don't enjoy they idea of being locked onto a OS made by a company that is DIRECTLY competing with them and has a very long history of wiping out competition.
It has far less to do with promoting linux as not ending up in the pockets of Microsoft.
For now DirectX is pretty open and you have the half-life people saying that the PC is for them more profitable because of the lack of license fees wich are needed for console titles. If MS every comes to truly own the gaming world how long do you think this will last?
You are living in a dream world. Small independent game companies are going bust. The Xth rehash of ancient games does NOT count. It is the orignal new stuff that is getting more and more owned by the BIG companies. Companies that can afford a string of money losing titles without going out of business. Would you enjoy a future where games are owned by only the big boys? I wouldn't.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sony really, really need to do something about the quality of their tools. I've spent the last two years on a game that runs on the XBox and PS2. The XBox tools are just amazing -for example you can click on a pixel and see a dissasembly of the shader that produced it.
:(
The Sony tools are hideous. Well, the debugger has a nice graphical frontend provided by a third party and is fairly slick and fast compared to Visual Studio, but the compiler and libraries provided are terrible - a patched up gcc 2.9.5 which has a prediliction for internal errors when the array indexing operator [] is used creatively , and that doesn't always optimise away empty constructors. And the libraries provided - at least initially were slow, and crufty and not suitable for game use. At least now, two years after the release of the PS2, Sony provides some decent middleware.
They MUST get developer tools right from the off with the PS3 - especially if it has 8 CPU's. I really, really hope they do. I'd hate to see my market swallowed by the Beast. At present it's economical to develop for the PS2 without needing a single Windows liscence. I hope it stays that way
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