Next Generation Cat Fight

The gaming industry may be an ever more lucrative business, but in some ways it seems as if kids are still running the place. Gamespot has up an article in which they discuss the nasty things the Big 3 have said about each other. From the article: "Robbie Bach: The other two companies' presentations [at E3] weren't surprising. Sony's [PS3's] capabilities are the same as ours. Nintendo is aiming for the niche market [with its Revolution]. The current-generation Xbox sold more than the PlayStation 2 in North America last Christmas. We will become the market leader with our next-generation console." The Guardian Gamesblog has commentary on this.

Comments

My dad is tougher than your dad!

[xutopia]

Usually these exclamations have no value whatsoever except in this case the daddys will be in the ring soon and we'll have real data to show who wins.

My idea is that they'll both be successful to varying degrees.

Why fight?

[ZephyrXero]

All 3 consoles will be damn near equal...there's no difference really except for the games and services now... It's time for an Open Console, but I doubt any of these three will want to give up their licencing fees...

Re:Why fight?

[Jacius]

The days when game developers had to program for specific hardwares is long over (except, I'll note, in the console industry). Operating systems and libraries like OpenGL and SDL take care of most of that now. Or, at least, they could and should. Game developers should develop for a library (or libraries), not for a set of hardware. The library developers develop for an operating system (or several). The operating system developers are the ones who develop for hardware. It's all about abstraction layers.

As for the "problem" of varying performance between PCs: you plan. You sit down and you say "Ok, we're targeting a system with 500Mhz processor and 64MB RAM. First, we make it fun. If we have time later, we can add toggle-able eye candy (stencil shadows, particle effects, etc.) that take bigger hardware." And then you do what you said. Although, you'd probably be better off forgetting the "If we have time later" part, because a) you won't, and b) it doesn't matter anyway.

From what I can see, most developers don't do this. Most programmers get off on the latest techno-crap like "bump mapping" and "per-pixel shading" which aren't even worth the development time to implement. But the programmers think it's interesting, and the hype-machine convinces consumers that it matters, so they don't spend time on the stuff that actually matters.

In short, the fixed hardware on consoles is a crutch that forces developers to spend at least some of their time on stuff that matters. It enforces a limit that developers should be enforcing for themselves. If the developers had the will-power to keep themselves away from their shiny toys, that hardware limit wouldn't be needed.

Moving on, there's no reason a PC game has to be "installed" any more than a console game has to be installed, except that PC developers like to take advantage of the access speed of hard-drives (which consoles historically have not had). It's certainly possible to run a program off of a CD (even in Linux), and software could even be written to control it with a USB controller.

And, if you had a TV-out port and USB controllers, you could put your PC-console-thing down in the living room where you put your other consoles, and play it sitting on the couch. Most PC towers are quite large these days, but they don't have to be.

Like I said, a homebrew box is probably the most feasible plan; a pre-built Open Console just wouldn't survive in today's market. Maybe, just maybe, they could be sold online and create a niche market. Then it might have a chance for indie developers to make games on it, and slowly expand the market by word of mouth (if these indie developers can force themselves to make fun games instead of eye candy). But if it's Open, what's to stop some other company from saying "Look! We made one that's just like the old one, but with MORE MEGS!" All the weak-willed developers would develop for that console so they could make more eye candy (and making it impossible to play their games on the old console), and we'd have the PC market all over again.

But still... someone show me an Open Console priced and under $150 with a decent API, and I'd buy one myself just to make my own games on, even if no one else bought it.

I agree with you that there's not a snowflake's chance in hell that the Big 3 are going to take the risk involved to do this. For one thing, their shareholders would just shoot whatever CEO tried to do that, because it makes absolutely no business sense.