Slashdot Mirror
Why Is It So Difficult To Allow Cross-Platform Play?
cookiej writes "I just got the most recent version of the Madden franchise ('10) for the PS3. Can somebody explain to me why EA has separate networks for the different platforms, only allowing players to compete with people using the same console? Back in the day, there were large discrepancies between the consoles, but these days it seems like the Xbox and the PS3 are at least near the same level. After so many releases for this franchise, they've got to have a fairly standardized protocol for networking; it seems arbitrary not to let them compete. Or am I just missing something obvious? Is it just a matter of Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network not working together?"
... sell you one copy of a game when they can potentially sell you two or three?
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
That was most likely the decision of MS and Sony respectively. EA is evil, but you can't blame them for everything!
Why would you want to allow your competitor console to play with yours. If one claims their network is superior to the others, that's a selling point and by allowing the other consoles to connect makes your "superior" network play a moot point.
For the same reason console players can't play against PC players.
If they allowed a direct comparison between different platforms, people would realize more rapidly which is better and which is worse.
I'd love to see a match of TF2 between a bunch of console players vs. PC players. It'd be such a joke. :)
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
MS and Sony (and Nintendo) want you to use their respective online frameworks. They obviously aren't compatible or interoperable (different name/nick/whatever namespaces, different friends lists, different registration procedure, etc).
You can't have cross-platform online interoperation unless EA uses an entirely custom online framework that is identical among platforms. The console manufacturers wouldn't be too happy about that, and neither would gamers (who want to register once and maintain one friends list for all games, not once for each vendor or game).
The only sane solution would require heavy cooperation between all console vendors and standardizing quite a bit of the online experience, but that's never going to happen (at least not this generation).
I actually read something about this the other day... Sony doesnt care about it. They are actually allowing cross platform with the upcoming FFXIV MMORPG on Windows/PS3. I can't say I agree or disagree with MS's reasoning, but it has to do with Quality Control on XBOX360. Back in the PS2 and XBOX days, all servers were managed by the developer. After a few years, servers shut down, and people still continue to buy the game only to find out that when they try to go online, it doesnt work anymore. Since XBL users pay 50 bucks per year, MS has to offer quality control that all online games will be able to be played online. Since with a PC and PS3 the network access is free, SONY doesnt owe anything to their users.
Even if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo were to come to an agreement about common online elements tomorrow, it'd still be nontrivial to merge all the player data, handle duplicate usernames, handle comparisons of records between different platforms and the such. Even if we disregard the political aspects, the technical aspects are daunting, and likely to grow even more so as these services continue to grow independently of one another.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
but I do know that the keyboard+mouse guys would _destroy_ the gamepad people in any sort of FPS.
also emacs is better than vi.
For the two systems mentioned (Xbox 360 and PS3), they're both using variants on the PowerPC architecture. While I can't be sure, I believe both chips use IEEE floating point numbers (outside of Crays, most chips nowadays at least have the option of using IEEE floating point), so the errors should be identical. I think the bigger problem is that the networking protocol for these games is usually licensed from the console maker, using the console maker's servers for matchmaking and the like, and it's considered to be less of a hassle to program against two different APIs than it is to write a single network protocol from scratch and maintain the servers required to support it.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
One may be more comfortable, decreasing the cognitive dissonance associated with translating mental (re)actions to hand actions.
That's not what cognitive dissonance is. Cognitive dissonance is when you take an action that contradicts or is not explained by your beliefs about how you should have acted, and you change your beliefs after the fact in order to explain the action you took. It is not just when you have some kind of mental uncomfortableness. I'm sure wikipedia has examples.
PS3s are big endian machines.
Xbox 360s are little endian.
Q.E.D They can't talk to each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
I agree with this, but didn't notice until now that cross-platform gameplay (PC-to-console) has been done on the 360 with Live (Shadowrun, FFXI) but not with the PS3/PSN. Even the Dreamcast let console players play in games with/against PC players. Just find it odd. As for the initial question, MS has a lot more to lose by letting PS3 players play online with players on the 360. It'd hugely tarnish the perceived value of Live if every game you joined was already full of people playing online for free.
"This is considered plagiarism."
No. The different consoles have different requirements for online play, and they aren't necessarily compatible. XBox live requires play through MS's servers and a live account. Sony requires companies to host their own. Nintendo has friend code requirements. It's not nearly as simple as the summary makes out.
You do know that an entire genre of games relies on a networking method that you're calling "wrong"?
How many thousand+ unit RTS games have you written?
The point is, it should be simple, but it's been made difficult for asinine reasons.
The Xbox and Xbox 360 use encryption implemented in the kernel as part of the Xbox Live matchmaking. There are many reasons for this but the main ones are security to help stop people altering the packets and cheating. This encryption is a requirement mandated by Microsoft before a title can be published. The encryption does mean the other consoles cannot decode those packets, unless a lot of effort is spent to reverse engineer the encryption and Xbox Live protocols. I have a feeling that if a publisher/developer did reverse engineer the Live encryption and protocols and used that to get Sony and Xbox consoles to join the same game then Microsoft would probably pull the plug on that title.
During development of titles I've had the Microsoft and Sony consoles happily joining the same games, but during development the encryption can be turned off. The PC build also had no problems joining the network session. This is because such titles tend to have the same network code and communicate the same data (before it gets encrypted).
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
Yes, both manufacturers want to ensure simplicity in their interfaces. The last thing Microsoft wants to have people to deal with is that when you select one player you get the usual XBox live guide options come up and when you select another it simply has to say sorry, this person is using a different console.
One of the whole points of Live, and one of the things Microsoft did well with the XBox was the consistency of it, it offers you a consistent experience throughout, if you start branching out to other consoles you lose that. Sony no doubt feel the same, although their interface wasn't consistent throughout startup to gaming, they've made massive strides in that direction such that it is much more so nowadays so also clearly see the benefits of maintaining that.
It's probably worth pointing out that there are games where XBox players can indeed play with PC players, simply because of Live for Windows which does allow Microsoft to maintain that consistent interface across platforms.
There are also outright differences on a code level, the PS3 can't hook into XBox's lives voice setup for example and vice versa so there'd be no communication between players of different platforms. Similarly, for games that use Microsoft's matchmaking and so forth again, the PS3 wouldn't be able to make use of it because I doubt Microsoft are about to publish or even license their proprietary protocol specs to a competitor. Again, the same goes for Sony to Microsoft.
Of course, there's the business side of things too, if your console has 20,000 people playing online at any one time and the other guys only has a 100 making it a pain to find a game then you don't want to give them the advantage of having access to your playerbase in the hope those will switch to your platform if it has more players.
because it costs money, money that doesn't translate into sales.
A lot like linux native support is perceived.
I record my sleeptalking
I'm sure there are some architectural reasons why games don't talk, but just think if TF2 was cross platform online play. How bad would XBOX 360 players do vs people with keyboard and mouse. I think they would be at a HUGE disadvantage because they don't have anywhere close to the same control scheme. This destroys all balance to the game. Granted you can buy an adaptor to use keyboard and mouse on the 360, but i don't think that more than the top 2% of hardcore games go so far as to buy a $100 add on to do it.
I used to work at EA and once had a conversation with a guy who wrote network code for an EA sports title. Basically, instead of proper servers controlling game state and updating clients, everyone sent their controller infomation and each client worked out where everything was independently.
I said "but since difference processors calculate floating point values differently, you'll never be able to play against different consoles"
I guess they haven't fixed it yet.... a lot of those titles are rehashed each year under great pressure and so have very old legacy code. I heard FIFA was still written in C (not C++) and that there was still a few bits of genesis code in the hockey game. They wouldn't have time to scrap it and start again, so likely this problem will be around for a while.
It is called anti-features. The "Windows 7 Sins" website mentioned it. I love that term. When it costs more for a vendor to remove a feature they sort of got for free - natural effect of smart design - yet they remove it anyway for political, administrative, and marketing reasons - it is an anti-feature. Manually and permanently reducing amount of concurrent TCP/IP connections available in Windows NT Workstation versus Windows NT Server (which does not cap the limit) despite both versions sharing the same code - antifeature. Limiting amount of applications that can be open simultaneously on one Windows version versus not doing so in another, when both share the same code again - antifeature. Filtering game client list based on platform, despite protocol potentially capable of providing inter-platform gameplay - antifeature. Everything that is destined for the consumer goes through marketing before it leaves the vendor. It is the fear of not making enough money.
Sorry, what was the question again?
"By the same logic you can't blame the bankers who ruined the world economy"
You can't blame them, but for a different reason. The seeds of the devastation were planted in 1999 [nytimes.com], when the congressional Democrats forced Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac to lower their lending standards -- suddenly, millions of people, who hitherto would not qualify for mortgage, were able to obtain one. The same supply of the real estate now faced a spiked demand, which in our highly efficient capitalist economy resulted in spike of both prices and building activity to meet the demand.
Unfortunately, helping the poor qualify for mortgage does not help them pay it off. That the Democrats were able to blame Republicans [ldsmag.com] (whose only fault was in not fighting against it hard enough) for this is a spectacular feat of mind-manipulation...
What about the much-maligned easing of banking regulations? Nope, that's not, what caused the problem -- even if it exacerbated it. Would you blame a powerful engine for an accident, when the car slams into a log lying across the highway? Sure, if it weren't running at high speed, the driver could've stopped safely without hitting the obstruction. But the blame is solidly on those, who placed the log across the road, not on the car-maker, that gave you the speedy vehicle...
I just wanted to say, excellent summary & analogy...and spot-on, even if it's off-topic for the discussion. I remember screaming at the TV back in 1999 when this was put in place; "Why are you putting poor people who can't freaking afford a house onto a near-certain path to default & bankruptcy!?!?".
This was so easy to see coming that it makes you start to take Glenn Beck & his theories on a planned collapse and reformation of the US as a socialist/fascist regime seriously, and I don't *want* to.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I'm posting this anonymously, but here's an example from the requirements of one a platform maker (names have been removed):
"Because the [CONSOLE] system is proprietary, connections between [CONSOLE] platforms and non-
[CONSOLE] platforms (including, but not limited to, PCs, Macs, cell phones, [CONSOLE], [CONSOLE], [CONSOLE], [CONSOLE], [CONSOLE], and iPods) are not allowed for security and customer-satisfaction reasons."
That's directly out of their requirements guidelines. Without following those guidelines, you can't get a license to release the game on whatever console.
Seriously? Fucking insightful? I hate seeing this same meme bandied about.
There were multiple actions by the government that worked together with a firm belief that housing prices would continue to rise to cause this situation. Deregulation by one party. Broadening lending standards by another. Bankers who found ways to make money that while not illegal, required a firm willful ignorance of potential future calamity.
No one group is responsible for this, and to try and claim otherwise shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
Seriously? Fucking insightful? I hate seeing this same meme bandied about.
There were multiple actions by the government that worked together with a firm belief that housing prices would continue to rise to cause this situation. Deregulation by one party. Broadening lending standards by another. Bankers who found ways to make money that while not illegal, required a firm willful ignorance of potential future calamity.
No one group is responsible for this, and to try and claim otherwise shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
You are correct that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are solely responsible, and nowhere did I claim or imply that. Both parties are at fault. The fault is with corrupt politicians seeking to increase their own wealth & power, and attempting to use the public's money to buy votes. I believe there are also other forces at work using these failings of both sides to advance their own agenda to "fundamentally change America", to quote Obama.
I'm very scared of precisely *what* that "change" that these forces seek will mean to our Republic and our Freedom.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Just out of interest which government legislation forced banks throughout the world to bundle crappy mortgages up with good ones and sell them on?
As I understand it, US banks & mortgage lenders along with Freddie & Fannie bundled these "toxic" mortgages into debt-instruments that they then sold & traded. Many financial institutions in other countries got caught holding some of that debt, as well as holding other US debt-instruments whose value collapsed when the US banks & mortgage lenders got in trouble from all the bad mortgage paper they still held.
The economy is global. When the US financial market suffers, so do other countries' financial markets. Just as when the financial markets in, for example, Hong Kong or the UK suffer, so does the US financial market, among others.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I understand that part. I'm just not sure how the sub-prime lending law was the cause of it. After all, damaging though it must have been to the US economy, it wouldn't have had such a dramatic global effect without those toxic financial instruments, and, as far as I understand it, those were a completely private sector invention that decent oversight would have prevented.
I doubt though the global financial crisis is as simple as either of us think though and keeping a very close eye on all the greedy fools would be in everyone's interests.
Just as a point as well: the UK doesn't have any such law and yet our financial institutions were doing very stupid things like sub-prime mortgages, easy to obtain debt consolidation loans, 125% mortgages etc etc. What we did have though was a similar relaxing of bank governance allowing them to do stupid risky things.