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Revolution to Allow For Home Development?
Via the Guardian GamesBlog, a BoingBoing post with an interesting posit. Will the Revolution allow owners to run their own code on the machine? From the article: "...the world of consoles that only ran signed code was a nice racket while it lasted, but at the end of the day, needing to get permission to run software on your own device sucks and devices that let anyone write software for them get more valuable as more people write more code for them." A nice idea, but not too likely in my opinion.
Would-be writers write new games, or even mods for existing games, a savvy corporation can increase their codebase for the cost of a contest with a few cash prizes for the most popular works - what's not to love with this?
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...between the press release and the posit seems to be wishful thinking.
Even "indie games" have a far larger license budget than an interested coder would be prepared to lay down just to play about with some ideas.
The rest of the paragraph they got this "information" from is this:
Freedom of design: A dynamic development architecture equally accommodates both big-budget, high-profile game "masterpieces" as well as indie games conceived by individual developers equipped with only a big idea. "Our next console proves small in size but big on ideas," says Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's executive vice president of sales & marketing. "We're throwing open the doors of gaming to wider audiences, from casual players to hard-core gamers who live for the thrill of defeating an endless army of wireless opponents."
Now, if you ask me, all this blathering from Nintendo's own is their way of saying "we made an accessible SDK that small teams can work with just as easily as large teams". That doesn't mean they won't charge to release the SDK, and that doesn't mean they won't make you sign certain rights over in order to develop for their console. It's a flimsy line, and it shows that Nintendo may finally be trying to woo third party support. That much is good. But I think the blog is reading wayyyy too much into this simple statement.
Running home-brewed code is one thing that might not seem that amazing. But what it does is let smaller development shops enter the market fairly easily. This has some seriously huge implications, and from interviews with Nintendo execs, it seems like enticing the small fish as well as the big is exactly what they want to do.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
reading something as radical as allowing home developement into nintendo's statements is a little stretch. I personally would love it and could see why they would allow it (homebrew is huge on thier portables) - but it seems to "revolutionary" an idea for console companies at this point, especially one that I think has historically been known as the most closed.
Of course maybe this is the revolution they keep touting.
I think that this would be a smart move for Nintendo. Especially if they follow the Apple model of offering a high quality free development environment for your system (xcode). End users make cool software at no cost to you. The more cool games you have for the system, the more incentives people have to buy your console. Especially if there is a lot of cool free content.
I have a horrible feeling we're getting too excited over here.
Isn't it going to be like the old Sony 'Yaroze' (or however it was spelt) system where you could develop for the Playstation, but with crappy limited libraries? I'm sure they'll still digitally sign stuff, so we won't be able to compile straight to it. It's a nice gesture though.
The interesting thing about the revolution is that you can download previous platform's games; now if the same basic concept is followed with indi (or homebrew) games their is a fantastic opportunity for most indi developers. Basically, a developer could (simply by using Nintendo's SDK) have access to millions of potential users; if set-up corectly it would encourage interesting and unique games.
There is always the risk that someone could exploit this set up to enable people to pirate games though...
As I understand, console manufacturers lose some cash on console hardware sales, and try to recoup their losses with game sales and licensing. So wouldn't a free licensing strategy undercut Nintendo's main revenue stream?
If they did this, they'd probably raise the markup on their hardware by a lot to compensate. But console competition is getting ridiculously stiff -- and having the highest-priced and (what will probably be considered) the lowest-powered console on the market would be a very tricky marketing spot.
Or, perhaps they hope that the open-licensing will generate more Revolution sales (albeit at a loss), and then that the greater Revolution sales will generate more game-sales revenue. Perhaps, but this is a serious gamble, IMHO. This would be betting the farm that Nintendo's games are more popular than Indie games -- and if Indie games are generating a substantial number of the console's sales, that's not a very safe bet.
Of course, this analysis could be completely off-base, as I don't know how much money is lost, if any, on console hardware. I'm hoping Nintendo's number-crunchers show this to be feasible -- but I'm not holding my breath.
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Putting game-making power in the hands of the people -- well, the people who are both inclined and talented enough to do something with it -- would really be a revolution in itself.
Think of the possibilities and remember, Nintendo, software sells the hardware.
This could easily be tied into the retro nostalgia push: imagine being able to mod or skin your favourite NES and SNES titles, or make alternative versions of Ice Climber or your own custom Link to the Past. It's just a step away from what the PC crowd has been doing for years.
Fear of piracy (using the dev kit as a backdoor) and malicious coding are something Nintendo will have to take seriously anyway, with their online plans. Mario Porn Stars and the like could be dealt with by a simple disclaimer (Nintendo does not blah blah the following game, characters, or blah blah, at your own risk.)
I know that I would be much more likely to go Nintendo this time around if this were true. My gaming budget really only allows for one system per generation, and I usually rent games for it at that. Rumors put X360 and PS3 past the $300 dollar mark, and frankly, that's too much money for something as trivial as playing rented games. But $300-500 even $600 for a console I can create and distribute games for in my spare time... Sign me up!
Something warm and fuzzy happens when I can say, "Oh yeah, I made a Nintendo game last week!"
This think put it best I believe.
...it was clear from the talk that Nintendo--the company so afraid of piracy that they shut down emulator sites and made their game discs in the Gamecube spin backwards--has no intention of letting fledgling developers copy their own content to the Revolution and play it.
Nintendo would be doing a very good thing if they released their SDK for free. Look at the modding community for an example of what free SDKs can do. Half-Life was released in 1998. 7 years later, people are still playing it, thanks to the dozens of mods that keep it going. As I write this, there are 87,348 people playing Counter-Strike. How many tens of thousands of copies of Half-Life did Valve sell because of third party mods?
Frankly, if Nintendo does this, everyone wins. Nintendo gets cash from extra Revolution sales and the extra game sales that extra Revolution sales would bring. Modders and Indie developers get easy access to the largest gaming market (consoles), get experience working with that market (something that is difficult to do when you aren't part of a large corporation), get their names out there, and make money. Gamers get a large number of new games, mods, maps, and other extras, some of them even for free.
Never going to happen, Nintendo is all about quality control, most 3rd party developers dropped the various Nintendo systems because of Nintendo's aggressive nature when it comes to content and distribution control. Because most Nintendo systems are marketed to be idiot proof, they will never allow code to be compiled and distributed without thorough in house testing, the possibility for disaster is too great especially if people start developing and privately distributing games with copyright and trademark infringements
How does this kind of rumor still exist? It's not like it's difficult to confirm this kind of thing. You can research this yourself - for example by opening the lid of a GameCube while the disk is spinning.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
You would need to build security into the system if you did. How easy would it be to write a simple program masquerading as a game that would erase all your flash memory?
What would really be amazing is all the little homebrew application that could be built using the hardware. Mediaplayer is about the only thing i can think of but there must be others.
I agree with most of the sentiments here:
1.) Would be way cool, and if they did I'd buy it immediately.
2.) Not likely given Nintendo's long, LONG history of iron fisted rule over their games and hardware
But,
1.) We were already told that the Revolution is going to play old Nintendo games. Its already going to have a framework for downloading and running non-Revolution code (most likely via emulation). Perhaps Nintendo will release DevKits that produce code that'll run on those emulators. I guess that would be like releasing NES/SNES/N64 DevKits (which they couldn't sell to developers anymore anyways).
2.) Saturo Iwata is not Hiroshi Yamauchi. We really haven't seen what his influence on Nintendo is going to be like - he may push for something, well, revolutionary like this.
I'd also like to point out that home brew is not without precedent on the consoles http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Yarouze/yarouze.html
1. Someone said that Nintendo makes a profit on their consoles. I don't think this is always the case, I'm not sure the N64 or Gamecube were like that when released. They probably cost Nintendo less than the PS2 or X-box hardware upon release, however. By now, with the advancement of technology and economies of scale fully in force, and with game systems not dropping in price as rapidly as they usually do by this time in a hardware generation, it's possible that all three manufacturers are making profits from console sales (though Microsoft might be making less than the others, since the X-box already benefitted from tremendous economies of scale by using stock personal computer parts).
2. Even if Nintendo is making profit from the sale of consoles, it would still pale before the royalties from licensing for games. That requires a lockout system in order to force people to buy licenses. If homebrew code were possible, then whatever hole allows users to run that code could also, very likely, be utilized by game developers. Of course, piracy is also a problem, but this is the real issue console manufacturers have to worry about -- piracy will never become a mainstream alternative to buying the games in stores, but if the general lockout fails to the extent that anyone can make games for the system, then the manufacturer's business model breaks down completely.
This is the price we pay for ultra-cheap game consoles, most of which are sold for way below the cost of manufacturing. There's no way in hell a PSP costs less than $250 to make, so Sony has to sell many games to make up for the cost to produce. It's a bit of a gamble, as Sony themselves discovered with the early days of the PS2 in Japan, when many people bought them to use as DVD players and not for playing games. Sony only gets money from DVD sales if those DVDs are made by Sony.
In the long run, these kinds of economic systems tend to break down. It's unlikely that console manufacturers will be able to get away with selling their hardware this cheap indefinitely. Eventually, a combination of manufacturer insight and economic circumstance will intersect, a system with true, official homebrew capability will be made, and if it takes off really well, just once, it'll be almost impossible to put the genie back into its bottle. The effects of this: software licensing will practically vanish, cross-compatibility between competing systems might begin to appear, and the resulting consoles will probably look a lot more like home computers than before....
Nintendo has already broken many molds in the Revolution that they were very set to keep. Backwards compatibility is a first for Nintendo. They were very set against it. Also Internet usage. They specifically said that Nintendo will not use the Internet in the Revolution. And here they are using it. So I think its possible that they might relax their content control too and allow home development.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
Maybe what they could do is tier the licensing so that people can use the sdk free but only burn to CD-Rs and RWs, then charge more for DVD/R/RW/RAM and regular pricing for the Blu-Ray or whatever they plan on using.
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
If they do, I can see the single-core 3.2GHz PPC in the thing being great for things like MAME and other emulators.
With the Internet and the online community thing being central to Nintendo's strategy this time around, perhaps they'll allow limited independent minigame development. Indie developers would submit the final source code to Nintendo for approval and QA, and, if approved, the encrypted executable would appear in the minigame download section of Revolution's download portal for purchase. Nintendo and the developer split the cash both ways, and everyone's happy.
And if the developer shows enough promise, Nintendo possibly gets them into a contract, invests in their talent, and gets the next big underground hit to debut exclusively on Revolution.
It's worth noting that the Revolution prototype box at E3 has two USB ports on the back next to the video and power ports, which marks the first time an industry-standard port has appeared on a Nintendo console. Of course, this doesn't mean they'll still be there at launch. Until people have the thing in their hands, anything's possible.
But, wow. Not only would Nintendo be redefining "backward compatibility", they'd also be redefining the industry accepted norm of the "third party". Or, it could be just yet another box that only plays discs. Guess we'll find out in about a year.
Judging from Nintendo's use of DVDs for the Revolution, I think they realize that someone will, given time, make a mod-chip for the Revolution. Eventually, that mod chip will drop from $100 to $40 per chip. What does that mean? It means that eventually, down the road, if someone wants to burn/buy/play pirated games, they will (I'm not saying that people who use mod chips are necessarily pirates. I'm only arguing about pirating at the moment.).
This brings me to my point: Nintendo can very well offer their dev kits to developers for, say, $1000 each. Slap that together with some basic form of DRM protection on the Revolution (so it won't become a repeat of the Dreamcast), and I think this will divide the developers from the pirates. Think about it. Why would a pirate buy a $1000 dev kit when they could easily wait a year and get a mod chip for $100? Afterall, one would have to pirate about 18 games just to "make up" for the cost of the dev kit to pirate those games. I don't know about others, but there certainly weren't 18 games that appealed to me the first 12 months of GameCube's release. And in case someone's going to say "but those developers can also pirate!", I'd like to respond by saying that the number of those would-be developers pales in comparison to the number of comsumers (i.e. it wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run).
So, would offering cheap dev kits be a good thing? Definitely. Does Nintendo have to worry about crap games being published? Of course not -- Nintendo can just make it mandatory for developers to get licenses before the developers try to sell the games. And to get the licenses, the game in question would have to first be evaluated by Nintendo and subsequently passed through Nintendo's own QA team. The only question that remains is how to differentiate between the few good games and the hordes of crappy games.
Backwards compatibility is a first for Nintendo.
Not exactly: GBC plays GB games. GBA plays GBC and GB games. Nintendo DS plays GBA games. And with adapters, Super NES plays GB games, and GameCube plays GBA games.
Revolution prototype box at E3 has two USB ports on the back next to the video and power ports, which marks the first time an industry-standard port has appeared on a Nintendo console.
Not the first time. The GameCube broadband adapter has a standard RJ jack for a cat5e Ethernet cable.
Sony only gets money from DVD sales if those DVDs are made by Sony.
But now that Sony owns both Columbia Tristar and MGM, it becomes even more likely that a given person will buy Sony's DVD Video titles.
Eventually, a combination of manufacturer insight and economic circumstance will intersect, a system with true, official homebrew capability will be made
It's already here, and it's called a Mac Mini (520 USD with TV output option).
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all have ways of getting you to develop for their
console - all of which include some kind of "developer console". The black
original Playstation, Microsoft's big XNA kit, Nintendo's "Dolphin" boxes etc.
with Codewarrior, DivX, Musyx with Dolby licenses and so on. and all this stuff
costs hundreds of thousands of dollars BEFORE you start coding the game on it.
Maybe Nintendo are going to drop the price of entry into the console market? Given
the easier production of their new media (DVD + DRM) compared to cartridges and
so on, perhaps they will lower the licensing/production fees too, and the VERY
strange system of forcing developers to predict sales, and pay Nintendo for every
copy unsold.
I sincerely doubt an open development licensing model is gonna hurt Nintendo. They learned A LOT with the GC and the DS. Until now, AFAIK, nobody did succesfully copy any game from these systems for piracy purposes. Also, lets remember that: 1 - Revolution comes with a SD card expansion slot; 2 - Revolution will be able to read standard 12 cm discs (CD, DVD?) So, as I see it, they will actually let you develop your applications such that they will be stored and played in a CD, DVD, or SD card. Piracy? I doubt it. For large corporations, they will probably use their own disk format, similar to the one used in GC, which will probably not be readable with the standard, free SDK. They will even be protecting it's own media with RSA, like they did with the DS. See now? They will certify AND protect his own business model, while at the same time making us homebrew developers VERY happy. Until this year's E3, I believed Nintendo was the same as Sony: a company looking only for money while offering "so-so" quality products. BUT, if this thing really comes into reality, then I'll have to say it: I LOVE NINTENDO! :)
Yeah- this strikes me as "we wish it would be true" territory.
First off- Nintendo are notoriously tight on letting other wares running on their systems (come on, the disc spins backwards on the GC if I remember rightly!).
Secondly, whilst the games industry really needs this revolution to occur, the revolution isn't going to be the one to make it happen.
I have looked into my dark crystal ball, and I have seen what I believe to be the future- this generation of consoles will suck the blood (money) from the big players- both hardware and software developers - and all will suffer. But it won't be a problem because no one will care- you see we'll all being playing a different type of game- either something on mobile devices (the success of the PSP and DS show the strength of this- and mobile phone gaming will completely take over the traditional game market very quickly, particularly in the UK and Japan where non-hardcore games will pick up the latest games quickly for fashion reasons) or we will be getting them from set-top boxes.
Now I know that last one seems crazy, but the Cell architecture Sony's hinting towards with the PS3 is a step in this direction already, networked architecture will mean that games will be distributed online and power across networks distributed in the home. Xbox360 also shows how this may work- a central powerhouse PC in the cupboard (more than capable of throwing polygons around) and a set-top box to play them through.
Online distribution will cut out the middle man in a sector that desperately needs to maximise returns on expensive projects, TV cash-ins will grow... it's a scary, but interesting future.
(PS- my crystal ball also told me to buy minidiscs and DDC tapes- it's not always right- but in a world of uncertainty, magic crystal balls are cheap to buy and are nice coffee table decorations).
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency (Eugene McCarthy)