EA Calls for Open Platform/Single Console for Games

eldavojohn writes "EA's head of international publishing made some interesting comments on what he'd like to see in the future of gaming. 'We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible.' While the rest of his comments imply that he simply meant 'one' platform instead of removing development licenses, it is an interesting concept. This is obviously a move designed to cut their development time and costs. But could this have other implications - like easier homebrew development for consoles?"

Comments

Dear EA

[scot4875]

Dear EA,

Make your own, and publish games exclusively for it. Let us know how well that works out for you.

Thanks.

--Jeremy

So EA's going to port their games to Linux?

[r_jensen11]

Yeah right. EA doesn't care about open platforms. All they care about is the latter part of the thread's subject: single console.

Linux has been available for a long time, large games (e.g. Unreal, Doom, Wolfenstein, formerly America's Army) have been available for it for quite some time. And yet they havn't ported shit over.

Re:It will happen...

[mikael]

They should learn from the experience of MSX - the universal game console architecture. The idea was basically that everyone would share the same basic hardware architecture, but it could be extendible in terms of custom controllers and peripherals. And that's where everything went wrong - some vendors chose to have that bit more memory in their consoles that others. Some chose to support light guns, others didn't.

Each company assumed that all the other companies would conform to the basic architecture for compatibility with their console, but that their added features would make their console, the one console system that the consumers would buy. Well, of course, with that level of incompatibility, the market just disintegrated.

The best we could hope for, would be standard programming API's, and perhaps even standard specifications for the provision and naming of assembly level vector/matrix programming instructions. Looking at the DirectX/OpenGL revision history, some companies couldn't even agree on which vector arithmetic operations to support.

Unfortunately, it is obvious that Microsoft isn't going to give up on DirectX, and that other companies aren't going to give up on OpenGL or the embedded system version of it. But everyone would have to agree on the same functions for using DMA for streaming, and all of that is going to vary according to how the console systems are designed.