David Jaffe - In Ten Years Just One Game Console

The folks at 'The 1up Show' had the chance to interview David Jaffe, the well-known designer behind God of War. They discuss his upcoming project for the PS3, Calling All Cars, the future of the God of War series, as well as the ever-increasing price of making games. From the article: "A lot of games recently it's cell phone, PC, DS, PSP, if you look at EA they blanket it -- it's everywhere. As a gamer, I kind of miss the 'you can only get it on this system.' There's kind of an excitement that was about that back up until recently. With this new hardware, though, that idea is seems to be going away. Is it really all going to come down to first party now? Or it ultimately going to come to one system? 'Cause 10 years from now there's going to be one system because there's so much more third party software than first party software from any hardware manufacturer. It may not be feasible to make it the war of the first party or the war of the exclusives." The entire interview is viewable online.

Comments

Re:One Console = PC

[ElleyKitten]

As PCs get cheaper I think they will take market share from the consoles, until the PC becomes the de facto single console. I think there are already more PC game titles than console titles, and the penetration of PC's is higher than that of game consoles.

PCs are the home of MMOs and simple puzzle games, but everything else is on console. The console market is booming because they are simplier, you don't have to run anti-virus on your PS3 and setting up 4 people in the living room to play games is a lot more comfortable and easier with a 360 than a PC. I don't think people are giving up their consoles any time soon.

Re:My thoughts on PC gaming

[ravyne]

Microsoft is actually doing all these things and a little more to boot.

As a game developer, DX10 really is moving in the right direction.

In D3D10 for instance, much work has gone into solving the "small batch" problem - a condition caused by the fact that state-changes (binding different textures, shaders, etc) are so expensive on today's 3D accelerators that processing many small batches can severly impact performace. Developers end up jumping through a lot of hoops in an attempt to optimally batch their triangles. This and other improvements to D3D10 have cut overhead by approximately one-half. They've also removed the capability-bits mechanism in favor of the more-defined feature compliance you mentioned. Cap bits were terrible because they only told you if a feature was supported, nothing about performance - Intel's Integrated graphics only support software vertex shaders (in the driver) for instance. Other accelerators make similar claims, or outright don't support a feature their caps bits claim to.

Microsoft is also pushing the play-from disc technology as well, though its slow to be embraced. For some reason, game devs are reluctant to do things differently than the way they've always done things, even if it is better - See all the bitching about migrating to the LUA profile model in Vista. The groundwork to do this is there now, its simply a matter of developers starting to make use of it.

PC joypads are also starting to come together now that Microsoft is pushing XInput over DirectInput. XInput not only provides a clean API to xbox-style gamepads, but also defines certain layout constraints. Things like the primary axis being the left thumb-stick, or button 1 is the 6'oclock face button. You'd be amazed at the amount of difference in non-XInput PC gamepads have in this area, "button 1" might be the 6'oclock face button on one pad, or the left trigger on another. This amount of variance is the primary reason that gamepad support is almost non-existant on most PC games, realisticly you'd have had to impliment a completely configurable control scheme, or not bother with it at all. Given the lack of a standard layout and the fact that it had to support every input device under the sun (gamepads, throttles, flicktsicks, peddals, etc) DirectInput became a unnecesarily large and comlex API. XInput pretty much solves everything from a developer standpoint, and its nice be able to take your Xbox 360 controllers to your PC when you need a gamepad; One (or more) fewer controllers to own and keep charged up.

The final big thing MS is doing to make the PC a more console-like experience is to bring XBox Live to the PC. Hopefully this will bring the days of everyone having different, half-finished or buggy multi-player lobbies to an end. A lot of companies have developed solid and featureful in-house implimentations over the years, aleviating the second two problems, but having a more unified experience is quite nice and will allow games companies to spend less time developing and maintaining their proprietary lobby systems. On top of that, there's now the possibility of playing PC vs Xbox 360.

In short, Microsoft is doing a lot to make the PC a more console-like experience, both from the developer's side and the user's side, but I still disagree with the grandparent that the PC will ever subsume the role of the console. People use consoles because they are stupidly easy to use. There's no worry about minimum specs or the quality of system components having a negative impact on performance. There's no worry about spyware or trojans. There's no worry that the input device you just picked up won't work well. Some of these problems are simply not solvable on the PC without pandering the a least-common denominator.

Linux and other FOSS Operating Systems will be able to ride the wave this will bring as well. Khronos is already working on OpenGL 3 specs which will streamline the API and bring it inline with D3D10 features, much in the same way that D3D10 is a streamled evolu