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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.
...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.
Funny (really), but I don't think they'd let any code go into widespread distribution without running through it with their army of lemmings (testers) first.
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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
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?
Not really. Reportedly Nintendo makes a profit on it's consoles, unlike Sony and Microsoft. Also, Nintendo is the #2 game publishing company in the world, behind only EA; I don't think hardware is their main revenue stream.
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.