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Gaming on a Universal Platform?
Riffing off of David Jaffe's earlier comments, an article up on the Next Generation site theorizes about a single unified gaming platform, ala the music and movie businesses. He proposes a 'videogame standards commission', which could look out for the future of the industry as a whole. They might, he says, not even agree with his conclusion that a global platform would be a good idea. The point, he says, would be to maintain "a detailed yet flexible long-term plan for progressive development of the medium. The board would assay in accordance with a constitution of irrefutable primary standards and ideals ... From what I can see the only way such a body could conceivably be formed is by appealing to the idealism of visionary designers and executives across the spectrum - your Satoru Iwatas and Ken Kutaragis, and Will Wrights and David Jaffes. The Game Developers Conference and other gatherings already embody some of the spirit of this proposal." Curmudgeon Gamer has extensive commentary on Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh's piece.
It's called "3DO".
For a variety of reasons...competition is a GOOD thing...in addition, while having different hardware might make cross-platform games tough, it makes proprietary games more interesting because the hardware in each console is different...each is capable of different things in different ways, thus lending to a uniqueness to certain games.
Case in point: SNES and Genesis. You knew which one was in use simply by looking at the screen.
Same goes for Xbox and PS2. And Dreamcast. And Gamecube.
And every other system (with the possible exception of modern PC games) Every system has it's own very unique look, and even many cross platform games look quite different. I find this uniqueness refreshing, and enjoy having a choice of gaming platforms. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses.
As a former auto-tech, one of my favorite mottos: The right tool for the right job.
(Another favorite is "the guy with the biggest hammer fixes the most stuff", but that's another conversation...)
Living With a Nerd
They might, he says, not even agree with his conclusion that a global platform would be a good idea.
You think?
Seriously though, there's already a near-universal gaming platform. It's called the PC.
Wizard Needs Food, Badly
I don't know how much more Universal it can get.
There are *very few* games coming out now that aren't ported to all three systems + PC.
I wish they'd decide on one platform so I don't have to get pissed when I find out Guitar Hero comes out a few months later on the other platform with MORE content.
Either pick a platform and marry it, or just release it to ALL of them.
... so what about java?
Gotta love a game that's free and I can play on any computer with internet access and telnet. Specifically, batmud is a great way to waste time. www.bat.org / telnet: batmud.bat.org
There's a reason we don't live in a command economy - it doesn't work. Capitalism is all sucky and stuff (and forces me to get out of bed in the morning for Christ's sake) but it's still better than the alternatives.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
* The "Greenbook specification" aka "Philips CD-i"
* 3DO
* Apple Pippin
With successes like these, who could doubt the wisdom of a universal game platform?
[...]
(That was sarcasm for those who didn't catch it.)
The idea itself is sound, but it completely ignores the technological advancements that keep the industry afloat. Consoles don't just sit still with the same graphics designs, the same media, the same processors, and the same controllers. They branch out from each other, each trying out new concepts to bring fresh new possibilities to gaming. You cannot standardize a thing like this.
The closest thing the industry has ever had to a true standard was the PS1 and PS2. They provided a fairly generic but powerful platform upon which a variety of games could be developed. With the success of the PS2 as a DVD player, it almost became as standard in the home as DVD players themselves. But that may be over now. Technology is moving on again, with a new batch of multiprocessing, motion sensing, and graphically interesting game consoles. Leave the "standard" console concept in the grave where it belongs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I thought Microsoft already developed that! :-)
Seriously, this is a great way to completely kill all innovation in gaming hardware. Standards are fine for industries that have matured to the point that the product is a commodity. At that point everyone can build to the standard and compete on price (or perhaps service). Fortunately, the game industry isn't close to that point. Do you want super-powered graphics, integration with high-def video content, internet based multi-player support, novel control schemes. You (the market) decides and the winners go onto to the next round.
[Insert pithy quote here]
They don't say much of any value. Hell will freeze over before Nintendo allows itself to be bound by a "videogame standards commission." We wouldn't want such a commission to be formed anyway. Major publishers and developers would only come closer to absolute power in the industry.
The standard most companies want implemented tend to be the standard they themselves developed. Otherwise, they would just be shooting themselves in the foot (in their minds) because then they couldn't sell them proprietary connectors, adapters, special tools etc... This applies across most industries... it's the reason you can't put a five bolt Chevy wheel on a Ford.
A real unified platform would be awesome for game developers, but it would be iffy for consumers, and a waste of time for the console producers (Buy our console! It's just like everyone else's!). And a big industry consortium to steer the direction of the industry for its own benefit? Brilliant.
Have you learned nothing from the MP/RIAA and their behavior? For heaven's sake, let the market take care of it.
Canthros
...marks the beginning of the Matrix. So long as there are different systems, we will always have to unplug - however briefly - to switch over to the competitor's product.
I don't think it would happen. There are groups of people who like the stability of consoles while there are also people who like the cutting edge graphics of PCs. One thing that might change is the way games are written by 3rd party game producers to help cope with porting games across platforms, so maybe they could write it in one language and have special compilers specific to the platform where the code wouldn't have to be hardware-specific. Not really like Java since there could be any number number of platform-specific compiled versions rather than machine-agnostic code running through a VM. But besides that, I don't think there will be a unified gaming concept. The only time I can foresee something like that happening is if we move away from PC's and stand-alone consoles into mass consumer mainframes where the network bandwidth to the house/phone/computer is fast enough to let the mainframe render the graphics and let the consumer play it on any thin-client. Computing/gaming power could then be commoditized.
You've mangled that linke to the Curmudgeon Gamer article.
Canthros
And... we'll call it the 3DO....
Notice a common theme with all of these "some guy says something about the game market" stories?
None of the people actually make games. They are all producers, level monkeys, or other forms of overhead type positions. People sometimes call it the Romero effect where the people who are actually making the game or art for a game are obviously way too busy to sit around blabbering on the Net or in interviews so you end up with guys like Romero out there using your game as a vehicle for their own self promotion.
There are some fantastically talented and knowledgeable about game development and the games industry people on the God of War team - Jaffe ain't one of them.
"Here's your official platform"
Three months later
Sony, or MS, or Atari, or someone: Here's a better one, and a bunch of games?
Now what?
Comission: We legally put you out of business. Stop it or go to jail.
Is this the world you want? Not me, pal.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The only way to do it is to make it a government organization.
I think that could work out pretty well.
Don't you?
This is an example what can be done with Java3D. Not really intended as a gaming platform, though
Zonk, thanks for the link to Curmudgeon Gamer. Could you please fix it?
Correct link
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Yeah, baby, yeah! We'll compensate the 16+ ms timer errors in the next frame, who cares, blame it on the CPU and the GC...
I'm perfectly willing to let the market make those decisions for us. At the moment, it seems willing to support multiple competing platforms, which is the absolute best thing for consumers.
And ultimately, where does some monolithic "standard" leave the possibility of innovation in hardware? Would Nintendo have been able to produce a small, inexpensive, and innovative console like the Wii by adhering to some standard? I sort of doubt it. It's fine to have standards for CD or DVD playback. But for games, I'll take innovation over standards anyday.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Thanks alot Zonk, totally retarded article, on slashdot! (not a surprise)
Competition keeps the industry healthy, if you cant decide, buy em all.
it's called OPEN GL
This is perhaps one of the dumbest things I've read in a long time.
What would be the result of implementing a standardized games format but to slow development to a crawl?
Movies and music CDs are standardized because their content isn't driven by the capabilities of their players - just the opposite. But game content is much more influenced by what your hardware is capable of. And since game content can either make or break your ROI, having to develop to some artificial committee-designed standard is a losing gamble. How could you possibly come up with a standard to fit the huge-variety of game content?
I don't think this guy thought this through too well.
I think you've missed the point of "universal" and the comparison with DVDs and CDs.
Right now I have to now my processor type and speed; the amount of memory I have; the type of graphics card and its memory; how much spare hard-drive space I have; my sound setup; my controllers... my PC is not a universal platform.
What they want is a commodity platform. As a CD is a CD is a CD, they want a game to be a game to be a game which can just go in any "game machine".
It's an admiral goal, shame it's such an unfeasible idea. (See MSX and MPC for previous attempts at an open "universal" platform.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It's called a Wii.
I use it for everything now.
Which makes it universal.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Someone just needs to develop a live distro for gaming.
The user interface would be simple. Put CD/DVD in drive, reboot. The live distro would boot, install the game to a partition (on a first run), and start the game. Variations that enable the use of USB drives for game and client data as well as multi disc games could be engineered.
This has many benefits. It enables gaming across a wide range of available hardware. Problems due to driver variations disappear. Hell, system performance suddenly goes through the roof because of all the non-game related processes that wont be running.
This method would give the game developer a far greater level of control to produce a game that does a better job of utilizing the available hardware. The problem is that the open source stuff out there is not as nice and MS's current offerings in sound and graphics.
Still and all, this is the time to launch such a project, with the threat of MS not bringing dx10 to the XP platforms. There is an opening in the market if game companies can offer live distro gaming at dx10 levels on machines MS won't support.
They want to have Nintendo games available for all, I guess. This is a bad idea. Competition makes it way thanks to platforms, not games.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
That is sarcasm, right?
If so, where can I find resources on this? I want to be convinced, one way or the other, about Java as a game development platform.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This will eventually just happen on it's own. For some time now, graphics have been driving game systems. It sucks but John Q is a fucking philistine with regards to anything other than graphics. I've heard so much talk about physics being the new revolution in gaming -- as it, you know, actually affects the gameplay, kinda important wrt the fun factor of the game -- and I've been really loving the incorporation of ragdoll physics in everything I play now; but unfortunately people who don't know their head from the ass still have the ability to judge aesthetics. That is what is demanded from games. And until we reach a point of photorealism that makes everyone realize that if it looks real but plays like shit, it's no fun, we will be stuck in this trend. I don't think it is too long now actually. Soon we'll have Hollywood graphics on every system, the particular platform will no longer matter, and every company will have to prove their shit through an engaging gameplay experience. Something independent of the power of the system on which it runs, something wholly dependent on the designer's imagination. That is the only time that hardware will no longer matter and "universal game platform" will make sense.
That's exactly what I thought. It's already been done. It's the 3DO. It doesn't work.
Nintendo wants its quirky features like a novel controller, backwards compatibility back to the NES, a way to play GBA games on it, a way to plug GC controllers in and a shopping channel. Sony wants Bluray and backwards compatibility back to the PS and proprietary memory sticks and compatibility with its proprietary Sony media sharing tech, and anyway, only 3D games without nudity are allowed, and the thing needs a huge disk so Sony can sell its music and movies through its online store. Microsoft wants it to run Windows and HD-DVD and USB and games need to be online and have achievments and it needs to be backwards compatible to the Xbox and it needs to hook into you media center and you need to be able to plug the Zune into it and play its games on Windows Mobile platforms.
And then you end up with a console that does everything and supports everything and is an overpriced steaming pile of crap that is even worse than the PS3.
And who will license games? Who will make money from this thing?
What does he mean with unified? Music and movies? Oh right, ehm, how exactly do I fold my Star Wars laserdisc to fit in a VHS or a BETAMAX or a DVD or a BluRay or a HD-DVD or a UMD or a V2000 or a 8/16/35mm projector?
Music? Oh fuck it I am to lazy to list the tape spool format, the minidisc, the 8track, the minitape, the digital tapes, music on video tape experiments, the cd, the enhanced cd's etc etc etc. Not even to mention the obvious incompatibilities of the various digitals formats.
But that is pendantic? Well, yeah, the format for music is currently the CD and for movies the DVD. This has also been true for a number of years.
And is this a good thing? You also can't MOVE beyond it. The DVD format is what you release movies on so you better make sure your movie doesn't require anything more.
Consoles at least have different makers and at least game makers got a choice. Every generation you can push a direction to go forward and see if it works. There is movement. There is things happening. Excitement, fun, lots and lots of money changing hands.
Just consider what a PC game would be like if it HAD to play on every standard PC sold within the last 3 years. No flightsims, since joysticks and a standard. No enhanced sound because soundcards ain't a standard. No fancy graphics effects because GPU's ain't a standard.
And yet, there is an entire game industry that works awfully well that works just with these limitations. The flash game industry. it works on any computer that can run flash and that is something most computers nowadays can, even linux machines.
Can consoles of today be made to run flash? No reason why not, so there you got your unified gaming platform. Does opera on Wii support flash? Voila, your request has been filled.
Oh, flash isn't capable of doing what you want in your game. Mmmm, maybe you need some specialized hardware, an addon. Something that sets it apart from the rest. Oh wait.
Unified platform sounds nice, it will happen at just about the same time as you no longer need to buy addons for certain games. NEVER. Who could play guitar hero, without a guitar? DDR without a dancepad? Rez without a vibrator?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A unified gaming platform is just what a PC is... There is no way that an unified gaming platform will ever arise, just because of one simple thing: the consumer.. The consumer want bigger,better looking games, and that's only possible with new hardware.. Even now with current Nextgen Xbox360 and PS3 people want even more splendor... And with a unified gaming platform that is not possible.. As I mentioned in the first line, the closest thing to a unified gaming platform is a PC..
My point is the following: Why do so few publishers consider releasing titles with a 4-player mode designed for set-top PCs or for PCs with 24" monitors? Smart-asses who reply to this question like to claim that "Atomic Bomberman from a decade ago and M-rated Serious Sam should be enough for anyone."
Both of these had the problem that there was a bunch of implementers who fought over a limited market, thus generating little profit for any of them. Especially the expensive ($700 in 1994 = at least $900 in today's money) 3DO was a dodgy proposition.
Having USPs (unique seeling points) lets the consumer choose based on other factors than just price. MSX vendors used this to add their variants on the platform, e.g. Sony's was more geared toward music etc. This is why people like me choose the PS3 instead of the 360 for instance: It has aspects that make it more interesting even though it is more expensive. The 3DO machines were almost the same if memory serves.
Yes, we would. The console portion of the Wii is anything but innovative, it's the controller that makes the difference. Obviously Nintendo could have just simply released the "wii-mote" as an optional peripheral, and have their games require you to have it. If the Wii-mote style controller proved itself over time to be the new benchmark in controllers, then the next itteration of the standard could have it become the default. An open standard would not stifle innovation at all, and it's complete FUD for anyone to try to say so.
The OGCC, which is already working on a standard much like the article describes, has already considered these issues thoroughly over the last year or so, since it's inception.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
The future is not in one game console, but in a centralized "mainframe" game service. You own a controller, and a hardware connection. The central server sends you a video feed. The video quality is then dependant only on the central server and what your TV can display. THe service could upgrade the graphics quality as they wish, and you, the player need not pay for any new hardware.
Obstacles that need to be solved:
- lag between controller input, server processing that input and displaying the results
- lagless delivery of video
Give it time though, we'll have this capability.
If Microsoft gains control of the console market through the XBox 360, it will have control over development, the platform, and online services. Gamers everywhere should be wary to support Microsoft's XBox 360. Sony may be evil, but they're also pretty stupid - Microsoft, on the other hand, is evil and sneaky - they've established a system where gamers will be hesitant to leave the XBox platform (XBox Live) because all their friends are on it. They're trying to establish control of gaming development by tying in PC with console development, so that developers have no choice but to develop for Microsoft.
Microsoft isn't good at innovation, but they're immensely successful at tying in their products together to keep customers and developers locked in. Sony is the opposite, they're great at innovation, but their attempts at keeping customers locked into their formats haven't been very successful.
I want go to the store, buy a game, and rip it to a .gp3 file so I don't need to carry the CD with my laptop.
But then the GIAA will come after me.
Raisinettes are my raison d'etre
I think it was called 3DO - and as I recall, it was an utter bomb. Do we really need to repeat this silly bit of history to know why it's not a good idea?
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
To
Standardizing the hardware segregates the hardware manufacturers from the game and accessory licensing. By doing this hardware manufacturers have NO CHOICE but to sell a the console at a profit. No other guaranteed source of income means they can't afford to sell the console at a loss. the Xbox 360 might have cost as much as a 3D0 when it came out but the difference is MS ate a chunk of that cost because they knew that they'd make it up selling games. None of the 3D0 manufactures had that guarantee, because they didn't receive any income from game licensing or accessory sales, so the consumers 3D0 price was higher then it cost to make.
It's a fundamental problem when you're trying to standardize hardware.
Collector's Edition
i guess a committee should be made to make sure one wheel can fit on a ford, gm, dodge, toyota, honda, mazda, etc. not being forced to match an "universal" format is what makes our economy what it is. if there was only one console to buy, then they could make it really crappy and really expensive because there would be no competition.