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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?"
I want a unicorn. I bet I get my wish before you get yours, EA.
Remember the 3DO?
Dear EA,
Make your own, and publish games exclusively for it. Let us know how well that works out for you.
Thanks.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Short form: homogeneous consoles => fewer console sales => less money
EA's hoping that the console turns into too much of a gaming appliance, which isn't going to happen. The economics behind it are just plain shot when you take a number of products that have their unique differences, such as platform-specific games and platform-specific controllers, and attempt to homogenize them into a group that has limited differences. The asymmetric competition between the consoles is the reason why sales are quite as high as they are, since a consumer may end up purchasing a Wii and an XBox 360 if they want to play Game X and Game Y, rather than being able to purchase a generic console that will play both games and take both the wireless pad and the nunchuck.
A standard set of requirements isn't going to happen either. While Sony and Nintendo are happy to work with OpenGL, for example, it'll be a very cold day before you see Microsoft embracing modern OpenGL support alongside their DirectX baby. Each console manufacturer wants to have a share of the market based on what their console can do that others can't -- see the Wii. Some are going to go after the newest technology and play Blu-rays, others are going to have DVD remotes, some will include hard drives. The console manufacturers will not see any particular utility in adding "allows competitors to play 'our' games" to the list of requirements.
Emulation may happen, by comparison, in one fashion or another. However, the above still applies, since any game that can be run using a standard engine can also be run by their competitors.
Devs would love the idea, I'll wager. Learn the technology once and keep developing for the same, iteratively improving target. They'd love it up until the publishers stop getting paid for platform-exclusive releases.
Someone in accounting realized they could increase their profit margin if they didn't have to pay 3 teams of developers.
Rumours that this same accountant found that the sweet spot of sales was 850 copies at $77.10 each have, as yet, been unconfirmed.
It's called the PC.
One: the console fanboys will have nothing to argue about. Wait, scratch that. We'd probably have posts about how UniConsole's red scheme is outselling the white scheme, but behind the jet black scheme followed. This would be followed by pages of overwrought analysis, flame wars, and someone posting goatse before the thread lock :p
Two: EA believes that in THE FUTURE, gamers might play on Nintendo "channels" and Sony "channels" through some universal console. Doubtful, but I hope virtual console offerings are expanded across the board. Digital distribution is relatively cheap and EA, Nintendo, etc. could sell games for years or even decades after release. Maybe a Steam-like system that allows me to transfer games from console to console with guaranteed compatibility?
As it stands, there are hundreds of games that are effectively lost to time for no good reason. Consoles come and go, games stop being manufactured, and eager players either have to buy rehashes (and the required hardware), expensive used copies, or resort to emulation (which doesn't always work, especially with PS1 games). With digital distribution there's no reason why classic games, which aren't inherently scarce, have to be so difficult to find. Plus digital distribution will help bankrupt the assholes at Gamestop...assuming Comcast doesn't throttle your game downloads!
Either the "open standard" will be extremely flexible, in which case you'll have all the problems you have with PC gaming, what with random problems with devices and confusing requirements, that drives people to consoles in the first place, or the "open standard" will be inflexible, in which case, forget expecting any innovative features like the Wiimote.
The cake is a pie
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.
First of all, I assume the Personal Computer does not count, because a console only has one hardware configuration (but that is what the operating system is for). The standardized game console they talk about wouldn't turn out to be too different then the PC, I can imagine, not evolving much except in minimum requirements.
Innovative features would go away. I shouldn't have to cite examples, but I know Nintendo has been on the innovative path, you would have never seen a pointer in a game controller or a touch screen on a portable, it would be the standard controller and buttons galore, not much else.
Having multiple consoles allows us the power of choice. Standards do not drive the console industry, competition does.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
hunt the wumpus doesn't use a jostick.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
A common platform for console games really only benefits companies the size of EA, and to a lesser extent, 3rd party multi platform publishers of any size. It would cut down on development costs.
However, there is no way that this will happen, at least not voluntarily. Doing this would effectively kill all but one of the platform manufacturers. Nintendo is not likely to do this. Too much history, and institutional pride. Also, even when they do not excel or lead the market, they are always profitable. Why share the golden goose?
Sony would probably not go for this either, despite the current difficulties with the PS3. The last time they tried to collaborate with another console manufacturer, they got burned by Nintendo. And they did do pretty damn good with the PS1 and PS2. And finally, assuming they do not self destruct from bleeding money and need to spin off or shutter their game development, they are playing for the long term. The PS3 is a good strategy to push Bluray along, and I have no doubt that it will work out for that if nothing else.
Microsoft may go for this. They are primarily a software house. If EA's plan did come about, I would bet that the side that works with Microsoft would dominate. Game developers just love their development tools. Having worked with Wii, Xbox360, and PS3 dev hardware, I can say that Microsoft's dev gear is the best.
Still, I just do not see this happening. Unless EA decides to boot strap the damn thing into existence, it will just not happen.
END COMMUNICATION
Point of order:
The original Game Boy didn't use the 6502 processor, it used the Sharp x80 processor.. sort-of a Z80 without the coolness factor of the bazillion registers the Zilog chip had, while still having a lot of the useful instructions Zilog added to the i8080 instruction set.
You make a good point, but it is flawed.
Consoles are dedicated video game machines, and as such are much more affordable than fully functioning computers. So once people buy their hot new video game console they have more cash left over for games.
Oh, wait a minute, it seems that the cheapest PS3 on the market is more expensive than a desktop computer+flatscreen monitor combo...
"I read in a xbox hacking book that the Sega Dreamcast died when they could pirate games for that system"
No, not really. The Dreamcast died when Sega was in it's last days as a hardware vendor. They could or would not properly advertise or support the system. Plus, once the rumors were out that the Dreamcast was dead, it was for all practical purposes dead. Rumors are like that in the gaming industry. Pirating was not a large phenomenon until after it was pretty clear the Dreamcast was dead.
In my opinion, the Dreamcast began to die the day that Sony ran it's successful campaign that convinced people the PS2 was the future of gaming not the Dreamcast. Sega did nothing to counter that feeling, either, because after the wildly successful 9/9/99 launch, they basically did very little to push the console.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
You don't need one console. You need one target platform. You have have 5 different consoles, or 50, and still write to a single common platform. It's called middleware. The middleware vendor figures out all the idiosynchracies of the different consoles, and then writes an API which sits above it. The game developer (EA or whoever) pays a license to the middleware developer, and then writes to the middleare API, and things more or less work like magic on all the different consoles. All you have to do to 'port' it to a new console, or the PC, is really deal with the input issues. A Wii is not the same as an XBox360, but when a friend of mine did the port of "Cars" to the Wii, it was really just a matter of revising the input routines, and some other tweaking.
No, it won't. While there is a huge incentive for game makers to have just 1 format, there is absolutely no incentive for game system manufacturers to allow that. All of the money that console makers earn is from licensing games and that sort of things, most of the time they lose money on each console.
If they were to start making money on the hardware, it could happen, but it is still extremely unlikely as the amount of money to be made on a single console is just not big enough to justify the change.
Basically, this is just EA's wet dream, the ability to make all of the money and leave the hardware manufacturers completely out in the cold.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Oh, and my PC display looks nice hooked up to it as well.
Doesn't make your penis any bigger.
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
If we had a single console, people would make "mistakes" putting it together, and you'd occasionally have to swap to another model to play a game not supported on yours. (Sega CD BIOS and Lunar for an example of what can happen) Given MS and Java, I wouldn't want them designing one of these.
3 companies currently have a taste for the money involved with being the console provider. Which is going to willingly give it up? Whether your game rocks or tanks, you pay them for the privledge of releasing it for their console. With one console, prices would skyrocket. As it is, the greed of individual companies is somewhat countered by the fear of driving a hit to the competition. This is part of why Sony WON'T back down from Blu-Ray. Forgetting the players, owning the standard is fairly profitable. (And a powerful tool negotiation-wise, at least until it's so broken with DRM that consumers CAN'T use it and give up.)
Also, would you want Nintendo owning it, perhaps making all the games for 6 months nearly unplayable from insisting they rely on the latest gimmick? Would you like Sony to control everything, blocking series you like (Working Designs, 2D games for a while when trying to push 3D), making nasty decisions (DRM breaking consoles, going ahead with the only plays on one console game-disc).
If a system like this was incrementally upgraded like PCs, it would have the standard PC problem of inconsistent play between consoles. Remember popping DOS games on Win95-98 class PCs and watching the on-screen blur? Even little timing mismatches could be nasty for twitch games.
Competition as some have noted above means companies will take more chances on off-beat games, always a plus. Staggered releases also force a bit more exposure for well-timed games. Most anything around the release of a new console will get tried. It may be crap, but an early game will get plenty of sales form parents who don't know better just because it's there, and their kid doesn't already have it. While it pushes crap, it also pushes potentially good games that might have gone unnoticed otherwise.
We need multiple consoles to keep the console fanboys arguing. A generic system is quickly forgotten about. When's the last time you argued about which brand of TV or DVD player was best? HDTV type perhaps (lcd, plasma...) How about sound systems? Your friends might have a few compliments for your new system, but it's for most, too generic to pay much attention too. The debate over what's best keeps the buzz going, and the systems fresh in people's minds.
It's already on the market, and most game producers are already developing on that platform. They're called PCs. PCs are cheap, and are -everywhere-. There are more PCs that are 2-years old or younger than all of the game systems that have ever been produced combined. The 'standard' PC architecture is constantly climbing in its capabilities, so any PC game produced today, even if it requires 'top-of-the-line' hardware will be usable by most PC owners within a year or maybe two, and again, we're talking about many, many times more prospective costomers than owners of games consoles. Oh yeah, and games produced for the PC today will work on most PCs that are produced two years from now. You can't say that about game consoles. All they have to do is produce GOOD products, and people buy them. (Blizzard is grossing over $1Billion/year right now. Yes, that's Billion, and that's only for WoW.)
What? No. Windows is *multiple* standards :-)
At the moment, the most relevant mutually incompatible systems are XP and Vista.