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Revolution to Allow For Home Development?

Posted by Zonk on from the hundreds-of-new-development-shops dept.

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.

1 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. See Mods for a PC example by theclam159 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.