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Activision Wants Consoles To Be Replaced By PCs
thsoundman writes with this excerpt from thegamersblog:
"We live in a world where we have multiple platforms for gaming: PC, PS3, 360, Wii, etc. Each platform has varying amounts of power when it comes to playing games. Activision, one of the leading cross-platform publishers, wishes to move away from the 'walled gardens' set by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. ... [Activision CEO Bobby] Kotick’s solution is to turn to the PC, where it can set its own model for pricing — not unlike what Blizzard has done with World of Warcraft and Battle.net. Kotick stated that Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
While moving away from consoles 'walled gardens' sounds great and the summary makes it sound all nice and everything, this is Bobby Kotick were talking about. The CEO of Activision who's primary goal is to milk as much money from computer games as possible by any means necessary.
In the article he is angry that while people pay for XBL subscriptions, Activision doesn't get any share of that. Basically he wants people to pay Activision a monthly subscription for online services, on top of the normal price for games. While it makes sense for games like MMO's where the developer needs the monthly subscription to keep up their massive server farms and keep creating new content, the usual multiplayer games don't require that. Just see Valve and TF2 or countless amount of other multiplayer games.
Forget about "opening up consoles", making the world a better place, ending wars and famine, he just wants more money.
Kotick stated that Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
Perhaps they could call it an X-Box.
Kotick stated that Activision would “very aggressively” support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt of making an easy ‘plug-and-play’ PC that would hook up directly to the TV.
A PC that would hook up easily to a TV?....hmmm don't we have a few of those, those are the playstation, xbox, and wii PCs. Would someone kick kotick in the balls plz
Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
So would I .... it would like a great MythTV box
Apple are on the right track for this type of box with the latest revision of the mac mini, having a HDMI port and a nice small form factor. If you could get a decent graphics card in there, you've got yourself a nice box.
The biggest problem here is, people really don't want another thing to plug into their TV, and in Steve's D8 interview he mentions that specifically about where the apple TV and soon to be Google TV product just don't have a way to make money. Perhaps gaming is the answer?
I hate Kotick as much as the next guy but I've always been a fan of the idea of a plug and play console/PC. Something using a custom OS that can be installed (dual boot by default) or VM'd on proper PC's and built into specially made consoles. This GameOS could do hardware checks to make sure certain minimum specs are always met. It could provide a somewhat reasonable DRM approach if it's baked into the OS (most people generally accept the inherent DRM of consoles). It's sort of like the logical extension of the DirectX concept. It provides a common framework with specified implementations. There could be a market for these set-top gaming PCs available to any electronics manufacturer. If this sort of set up is easy to target for games and easy to use for the consumer and has built-in DRM then I see it as a win/win-meh/win.
And then we would have people upgrading their pc's and others not. There goes the easy part and here comes "Each platform has varying amounts of power when it comes to playing games". Unless he wants to create some sort of home console that instead of upgrading you replace every so many years. What a novel idea i wonder why no one has done that before.
There are no shortage of companies that want to tinker and salivate over how Blizzard's business model works. It's a game, direct to consumer, that has a monthly recurring fee with a very nice retention rate. So far, everyone has been absolutely god awful at pulling this off. The desiccated and dismantled battlefield of competitors goes to show, Blizzard has magic that isn't easy to reproduce
I think the closest analog that Activision could come to is Steam. Yet again, deeply entrenched business model, direct to consumer with a nice retention rate.
What Activision wants is control over the entire food chain. They are neither ready, nor well developed enough to jump from a business model they know incredibly well, to what is working on a, very profitable basis, but across a very, very narrow list of businesses that pull it off.
The best thing Activision could do right now is ditch the idea of a PC under the tv. People for generations of games have made a very clear delineation for where they want their pc's and where they want on their consoles. And any company such as a Dell or an HP would be complete morons to go after that failed market again, and again.
What Activision needs to do, is sit down with whoever they have doing arcade games. Take that, pop out a Steam like client, and make it a)not a crippled, bloated piece of shit b) not DRM'd to the point where you're screwing with your call center numbers by increasing traffic off a small step into the market and finally c)make it compelling.
God the number of amazing indie developers out there that would kill to have Activision's resources behind their projects, without Activision being a general corporate pain in the ass... Go for the small market see what you can do there, it's your test pool. If you can't work out strategy there, then you're not going to do it where the big fish play. Remember, small nimble teams with experience.
Then again, since when has Activision listened to anyone screaming "NO THAT'S A HORRIBLE IDEA, WOULD YOU PLEASE NOT DO THAT" and then watched whatever they've tried doing bomb, and tumble into disaster.
Forget about "opening up consoles", making the world a better place, ending wars and famine, he just wants more money.
You sound very cynical. I think Bobby Kotick has learned that being evil is bad and he wants to redeem himself by making the gaming experience easier for children. He's merely thinking of the children when he wants to make games like Armed and Dangerous easier to experience with a PC environment.
P.S.
I am NOT Bobby Kotick. I'm just an AC who is giving an objective, unbiased opinion.
640p halo limits to monster numbers, world sizes and artistic visions.
Glad someone is thinking about new games on this generations gpu's with all the new features.
Get the income stream. back to the producers not to some middle empire feeding of users and creators.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV.
Isn't that sorta the definition of a console?
Console:
PC:
That's my own personal experience of PC vs Console gaming, and quite frankly I (as I imagine quite literally millions of gamers also do), prefer to simply insert the disc and play the game. I don't care that I don't have a nVidia 10 Billion X, allowing 19404 x 19304 resolutions, 256-bit colour, 32x multi scene ahead-of-frame anti-aliasing, with hardware bloom and post-processing eyeball burning rendering effects, I just want the game to work the developer intended it.
(goes and puts on anti-flame suit)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Slowly, but surely, your online presence, entertainment and data statistics will be collected by consolidated all into one box that does everything. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Comcast, Verizon, Sony, Cisco, Juniper, Qnap, Seagate, Activision, Electronic Arts, Vivendi, Facebook etc etc.. TV's, Search engines, Hard drives, Computers, software, Nas boxes, Gaming, Network equipment, media boxes etc etc There is no place to hide, The Cloud is coming. All your base are belong to us. "Its alright we know where you've been!" "So welcome, to the machine"
And what will this 'open' PC be using for its OS? I, for one, will not fork out for a copy of windows and spend a fuckton of cash on a high end gaming PC just so I can enjoy games. My xbox is much cheaper and means I don't have to infect any of my machines with Windows. I know the xbox is running some kind of windows variant under the hood but I never have to deal with that in the same way I would if it were on one of my pc's, I'd much rather have a console, kthnxbai.
You're aware that Activision and Blizzard are basically the same entity now, right? I don't think Kotick is drooling over something he already owns.
Ex. Modern Warfare 2:
"Criticism has arisen of changes made to the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 including the lack of dedicated servers, latency issues of the listen server-only IWNET, lack of console commands, lack of support for matches larger than 18 players, and inability to vote towards kicking or banning cheating players immediately"
Remove the benefits of PC gaming, and gamers won't game on a PC..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
I mean isn't that basically what he's describing here?
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Wait, Activision? They're still in business? I would have thought Robert Kotick would have ran them into the ground by now. God, he's getting slow in his old age.
What's that? He's trying to turn Battle.Net into "Facebook for Gamers?" He's going to require everyone playing WoW to use their real names on the official forums (and in the in game friends' list), so that the next time you piss off some mentally unhinged social reject you can figure that out by the knife embedded in your front door and the creepy breathing phone calls at 3 AM?
Ah, nevermind, he's right on track for running the company into the ground, he's just going slow so he can show off.
This would be great, IF this gaming PC could play titles from various platforms. OTOH it would require some degree of technical know-how to maintain such a PC, I mean look at how we currently tweak to get a game running on occasions. And what about infections?
A Linux based box, for stability and security, that runs a sandbox for Win games, perhaps with something like www.reactos.org, with direct hardware acceleration to avoid such bottlenecks.
Hardware is cheap nowadays so multi-processors and a few GiB's of RAM, nice high RPM drive.
Best of all, anyone can build one of these.
This Kotick guy wants something he can't have unless he ponies up the investment himself. He needs to talk to fabs and board manufacturers (mother-, graphics-, sound-, and peripheral-) to get large quantities of identically designed and spec'd hardware which conforms to the x86 architecture. He needs to make sure it runs an operating system his games will run on, namely Windows. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't differentiate between different x86-compatible hardware, so any and all hardware which conforms can be used. Oh hey, isn't that a PC?
By the way, will this box be able to browse the internet, download flash movies, get viruses, require reinstallations of the OS like Windows does now? Because we already have those kind of boxes; They're called PCs. If not, we have those too; They're called consoles.
Is it me or is Kotick living in Cloud Cuckoo Land? A console that isn't vendor-locked is a PC. If you want your own console, build it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Well, sort of. Actually, not really. Someone who explicitly just wants to replace Sony's walled garden with his own, doesn't exactly strike me as a sort of freedom fighters. In fact the whole situation kinda gives me the mental image of fighting Apple's walled garden by replacing it with Microsoft software.
The fact that the PC hardware itself will be open is effectively just a way to pass that unprofitable part to someone else. PC's commoditization just drove the profit margins of PC vendors into the basement and allowed MS to stick to the part where it can rake in the taxes like a king. In the end it's one reason why MS did better than apple, back in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Activision here wants the same thing. It wants the likes of Dell and HP to do the work of building a cheap PC that's kinda like a console, but not charge royalties for it, so he can get the money instead.
And generally I would question the logic between giving your vote to someone just because they intend to replace another asshole. The history is full of examples where that was a bad idea. I could even Goodwin it by mentioning a certain election in '32 where some people thought they'll show the established parties and coalitions by voting for the new and vocal third party, so to speak. Yeah, that went so well. But otherwise from Lenin to Yuan Shikai to ancient greek tyrants (yeah, most of those used populism to subvert the self-serving oligarchy that passed for ancient greek democracy), we have some millennia of people who offered to save us from they tyranny of someone else by replacing it with their own.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... they could provide their games on bootable Linux discs. No install needed, no patches possible, full control over the player's experience, with the added bonus of being able run the games in Linux. Just a dream? Also no need to update DirectX.
What you have here is serious jealously of Xbox Live and soon PSN as they look to monetise it. They are seeing the huge profit MS is starting to turn on XBL (while at the same time forgetting the years of investment ie losses it took to get there) and just like a petulant child they are trying to figure out some easy way they can claim a slice of this pie (while at the same time not actually do anything to earn it).
"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible,"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7052420.stm
Are you sure about this strategy? World of Warcraft is running out of ideas as fast as they are subscribers. Modern Warfare 2's PC version is already played by fewer people than Counter-Strike, an eleven year old fan mod. Starcraft 2 is not subscription based and don't get me started on Guitar Hero 40.
To beat money out of a PC franchise, it needs to be good. Ask EPIC about how well games that compete with Halo compete with Valve.
an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
Sounds just like the ZX Spectrum I had in the 80s.
A quiet PC with HDMI for output, usb gamepads for input, and a ton of emulators is already the perfect console; simple & reliable, yet flexible and upgradable, no rats nest of cables, no CDs to get damaged (no moving parts at all, if you can afford the latest stuff). Add XBMC and you have all the living room technology you need in a single box :)
On a tangent, I ponder the possibility of having a standard virtual machine designed for games -- having a ton of emulators to convert from consoles to the PC environment is a lot of duplication of effort, and it's not like it's great for the manufacturers either (last I checked xbox hardware was sold at a loss, PS3 was selling at a loss for the past several years), so it there could be benefits all round if the console manufacturers stop making limited hardware, and start making generic living-room processing units (ie, what I have in the first paragraph, but designed for it, rather than cobbled together by the end user)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Didn't the XBox do exactly that?
Okay, it was a rather underpowered PC, but still...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
They seem to have no end of ideas on how to keep the gravy rolling in.
My only criticism is that their recent ideas seem to have made the game much less difficult to play and therefore less of a challenge.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Talking about walled gardens, perhaps we can also replace the iPhone and iPad by PCs?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
After reading TFA I feel I need to poke one's eyes out...
One does realize, doesn't one, that Activision is interested in units sold, regardless of one's platform? The more platforms one can compile one's game engine and downsize their artwork for, the more likelyhood one has of selling a game to another one.
PS: Where did one learn to write?
I just wish there was something similar to Mythbuntu for gaming PCs.
I want to be able to install it on a home brew computer or net top, plug in my usb game pad, and navigate to a simplified package manager (that just shows the games section...there would also be an update manager and package manager with a full list of packages if you switch to desktop mode) where I can install some of the many awesome OSS games / Emulators / etc available and just play them.
There are a lot of USB Gaming devices (thank you Xbox 360) that can be plugged in and work right off the bat. For example, I have a USB guitar that works with Frets on Fire.... and a few cheapo $5 USB Game pads that work just fine...
If something like this existed, I bet it would be extremely popular, and we would see a lot of OSS home brew game consoles cropping up....and a lot more OSS Games cropping up simply because people would be able to rig up their own game consoles.
Make America grate again!
He's merely thinking of the children when he wants to make games like Armed and Dangerous easier to experience with a PC environment.
Here's an idea: Make the retail game or the basic download stuck in paintball mode so it can get that E10+ or T rating. Then put a coupon in the box for DLC with the blood in it, which (unlike stuff hidden on the disc) is rated separately.
Not exactly the same thing (as others have pointed out, XBox = PC with a TV-out - it just gets abused whoever makes it into a vendor-locked system) but anyone remember the Amstrad Mega-PC? Huge ordinary PC (of the 386-era, I think) with a little slidy door that revealed a Megadrive slot and turned the computer into a Megadrive (Don't think it was emulation, just a switch to an internal Megadrive board).
I would have killed to have the money for one of those at one time.
If every publisher started up it's own variant of XBox Live, you'd have to pay subscription fees for every publisher, maybe for every game.
You already see this with MMORPGs. But publishers will try to keep prices low even if only to attract price-conscious customers. Look at Activision with every Blizzard-brand game other than World of Warcraft: anyone with a valid serial has at least 5 years of free online play.
Funny, I was just thinking the other day (while de-malware-izing my sister's computer for the fifth or sixth time...2000+ trojans, backdoors, and security-disabling programs; a task that left the computer itself barely able to run) "I wish that for this sort of person, there was the computer-equivalent of an xbox: a decent PC with good video and O/S hard-coded in, untouchable without the addition of something physical or at least without the use of a dongle, perhaps with a hard drive for storage of documents, data, and savegames.
-Styopa
Modern video cards already have TV out hardware; DVI -> HDMI adapters come in the box of nearly ever video card I've seen in the past 2 years.
The impression that I get from reading comments to other PC vs. console articles is that gamers tend to play games on secondary TVs, not the main living room TV, because someone's watching a show like American Idol on the main living room TV when they want to play. These secondary TVs are often $10 thrift store CRT SDTVs that don't take HDMI. However, they do take VGA through a $40 adapter cable that produces composite video and S-Video.
what a piece of nonsense.
We don't need a new computer type. We need a little bit of innovation regarding connections.
If you have a computer in your computer room, and a flatscreen TV in your living room, why can the computer not use the TV as an output device? Wire, wireless, don't care. Why invent a new device if it does nothing you don't already have?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Trip Hawkins (aka the man behind Electronic Arts) joined forces with Panasonic (aka the Japanese electronics giant Matsushita) to create the 3DO which was basically supposed to be this.
It didn't work for a variety of reasons, most of which still hold today. In fact, a few more reasons have been added since then, not least of which are that both Sony and Microsoft are now major competitors.
I'm not saying it couldn't work, or even that it wouldn't work; I'm saying that if the CEOs of the likes of Dell or HP have the slightest bit of sense to see how this played out in the past, then they're going to need a lot of convincing.
I said older, not laptops made with low power consumption and cheapness as goals. That's like expecting MGS4 to run on a PSP.
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Best of all, anyone can build one of these.
Most PC cases available in local shops aren't well suited for HTPC use. For one thing, most are thick and designed to stand up as a tower rather than lie down as a "pizza box".
sure
Trogre: Please read the replies to JohnRoss1968's comment.
But if Wikipedia's to be believed, only 2 out of 7 of Activision's 2010 games have PC versions, as do 4 out of 11 of its 2009 games.
Actions speak louder than words. Words like "we can provide more value outside of walled gardens" don't matter when the corresponding actions are "Thank you sir, may I have another!"
perhaps we can also replace the iPhone and iPad by PCs?
Android phones come close. MeeGo phones come even closer, but Nokia doesn't do much business in the United States, Slashdot's home country.
Today's games are only 10,000 times bigger because of the higher-fidelity audio and higher-resolution graphics.
It's not just higher-resolution graphics; it's also more general graphics and more capacity for world simulation. On most consoles prior to the original PlayStation, all sprites needed to be pixel aligned, reducing the ability to show depth by drawing things bigger or smaller or to show direction by rotating the sprite cel. Super Mario Galaxy couldn't have been done on NES. There are also several reasons why a game like The Sims or Animal Crossing couldn't have been done on an NES either. See also other limitations of the NES.
I don't have an MBA or run a successful business, but I have noticed something. There is a certain point of revenue making that a company goes through that nearly requires them to change the business model in some form (thereby screwing over the existing customer base). Perhaps this is due to the government mandate that all businesses must return a profit. Hence all the short term profit seeking. I think Activision/Blizzard has reached this point. Or from my viewpoint, Activision is doing this. Blizzard knows it has the formula on making great games* and has seemingly never been worried about taking all the time necessary to make a wonderful and highly anticipated product.
*It could be argued that the secret sauce left with Bill Roper and gang.
Enter Activision. For the most part, it seems as though they have kept their promise that they won't mess with the creative process that Blizzard has for making games. What Activision is doing, is systematically trying to find alternate revenue streams to exploit the success of the Blizzard games. Battle.Net 2.0, the dumbing down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_down of World of Warcraft, WoW influence on Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 loss of LAN play, and Real ID. These are the ones that the public knows of. Every once in a while, Activision trots out some talking head about how they are gong to change the gaming market or explain to the customer base why a certain 'feature' is a good thing for everybody concerned (read: we think this will make our share holders the most money and were told to do this).
All in the name of making even more money. Countless companies have gone though this: Id Software, Ubisoft, Bioware, there are too many to list. Valve seems to be immune to this effect and I bet it is because they are privately owned. I personally think capitalism is a great thing but at what point is it detrimental?
- or -
I could be talking out my ass and should be ignored. :)
and a lot more OSS Games cropping up simply because people would be able to rig up their own game consoles
People can already rig up their own gaming HTPCs. Why don't we see more OSS games for those? Because the OSS model has been proven to work for code libraries, not entertainment works, especially not the majority of a game that is something other than code.
That tag is a bad one, the reason Activision wants to do this is what they've done to Warcraft. They want the micro transactions and the ability to rampantly charge for services and NOT have to go through a middleman like Microsoft or Nintendo.
This isn't the "finally" we're looking for and really I would argue there are a large number of people that PREFER to have consoles because of the consistency in most consoles. I like that I don't have to tweak my system to get the best possible experience. I like that I only have to buy a $400 game system every 5 or so years instead of a $150-300 video card every other year.
2Dboys did manage to get World of Goo on wiiware, but it was well after the game sold like hotcakes with free ponies on PC/Mac/Linux.
That and the fact that after it became well known what 2D Boy did to satisfy Nintendo's "not a home office" requirement, Nintendo isn't likely to let it happen again.
I said older, not laptops made with low power consumption and cheapness as goals. That's like expecting MGS4 to run on a PSP.
The PSP has games developed specifically for the PSP. So why don't I hear more about games developed specifically for netbooks?
They come close AFTER you root the devices which is akin to Jailbreaking.
You don't need to root an Android device to install apps from "unknown sources" unless you got it from the AT&T store. On iOS, you need to pay $99 extra per year for the developer program to unlock "unknown sources" even if you bought an iPod Touch or Wi-Fi-only iPad.
Activision wants Bobby Kotick replaced by someone who can actually run a company and come out with new ideas for games.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
That's worse than asking if you can play Assassin's Creed 2 at 1080p on a Wii... Nobody in their right mind views a netbook as a gaming machine.
Nobody in their right mind views a netbook as a gaming machine.
Yet people in their right mind have seen advertising that portrays DS, PSP, and iPod Touch as gaming machines.
The misconception that you have to buy a 500 dollar video card every year is a complete fallacy and myth. I owned a 8800gt for 3 years before I finally bought a new one and to top that off the only reason i did that was so I could run it at ultra high resolutions. I could of run the card for another couple years and been just fine and still been ahead of whatever the xbox resolution is which I think is 720p capped. Furthermore you don't even need to spend 500, 300 or even 200 dollars to have a card that will play most everything on the market maxed. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an idiot. On the flip side this does sound like a call from activision to increase their own profits. I don't think they care if their game is on one system or another they just want to make more money and if they can deliver pay DLC without having to pay a middleman $5 dollar tax on a $15 dollar DLC they would increase their profit %30. I don't know what changed in peoples minds to make them accept pay DLC. Even 6 years ago paying for extra content outside of a seperate expansion pack was unheard of. Now developers charge the price of the game for content that was already included in the game. I hate this practice with a passion. Especially when I'm paying a $60 price tag.
steam does the updates for you and makes keys easy / easy to buy on online as well.
I don't have time to even try to run a gaming PC any more. Just too much hassle. And no - to those that say "it got easier with whatever version of windows is out now" - I don't care. I have more important things to do with my life than buy graphics cards costing more than a PS3 & Xbox combined and find the drivers for all the peripherals and make it all work. Been there, tried it, had numerous favourite games stop working because of Direct X blah de blah... Had an entire force feedback steering wheel stop working because drivers were no longer made. You won't catch me again. It's over...
- Paul
With probably a gimped OS that lets you launch games, maybe web browse a bit, and watch movies... probably has limited peripheral support... kinda like, i dunno, a console? :)
Hi this is 1993, we want our 3DO Console back.
Depends on your definition of gaming. If you're talking about AC2, no, it's not a gaming machine. If you're talking something indie like Overgrowth, Osmos, Caster3D, Cortex Command and others- it's a gaming machine...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
He's got a problem of drawing the box too big... Where does AC2 run anyhow?
PS3?
360?
mid-to-high end Windows PC?
If your definition of gaming is that, yeah, there's nothing handheld (yet...) that can meet that criteria, even netbooks. With OMAP4 and other Cortex-A9 SoC's about to show up in gear sometime this year, that story might change considerably.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Some engines scale reasonably well though, Cry2 will, and I think the current version of Source kind of does (although from the wailing about how it upped the requirements of CS:S I'm not so sure Source 2009 would scale that low - then again a lot of CS:S players haven't upgraded their boxes since it came out and then some :p ), so you might get away with low settings at 640x480 resolution and manage a relatively-but-not-quite smooth 40-60fps.
To start developing games on Windows PCs you need a few Windows licenses and some development tools, but on a console you need development tools and then pay a licensing fee to the console producer, presumably on each game copy you sell.
It therefore sounds like Activision are looking to get the best of both worlds - namely development on a fixed platform (where they don't have to worry about countless different CPUs, graphics cards, etc.) but without having to pay the licensing fees.
Corporate greed in action...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
And everyone who wants to replay their copy of Half-Life 2, it's expansions, or Counter-Strike: Source now has to put up with a bunch of random glitches brought on by the new cross-platform engine. In my case it's even worse as the new engine has a strange interaction with my video card that renders games unplayable. This on a PC that handles Left 4 Dead2 and TF2 just fine, as well as Crysis on high settings. Thanks Valve, for the convenience.
The "new cross platform engine" actually only changes a few libraries on the mac; the engine was always abstracted enough to allow the porting to happen in the first place.
But, true, some updates might be a bit buggy, CSS was still running on a version of source going back to 2005.
If Microsoft release XBOX os for free, so anyone can turn their PC into XBOX, wouldn't that be a simple solution?
When RealID was rolled out, they said it's for friends and family and people you trust.
But you have to trust all of your friends' friends. You know, people who may or may not be friends, family, and anyone else you know.
You could ignore that and never be able to chat across games, servers, or factions.
With the forums, there is no opt-in. You post, you're name is revealed. From the sound of it, you don't need to be logged in to the website to see people's real names. They're doing this to... what'd they say again? Bring responsibility and accountability to posters? To prevent trolling? Chilling effect is what I believe it's called.
A community manager offered his name to placate the masses. This has led to a new word: Whippled. Definition: Trying to ease the worries expressed by your captive audience only to show that those worries are well founded.
http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Americans-are-bad-at-games/Real-Names-on-the-Official-Forums-New-REAL-ID-function?gr_i_ni
Other people have said it's not a bad idea. This was one of them (note the tense): http://seewhatyoudidthere.com/2010/07/07/realid-changes-the-very-real-ease-of-stalking-in-the-internet-age/
Others still are saying they will opt-out and never post on the forums. That's nice but it's not ending here. Oh, far from it. They've got a deal with Facebook and, by the looks of it, they're going ahead full steam.
Official topic is well on its way to 40k replies now. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25712374700&sid=1&pageNo=1
Take that Gamestop! Thats what you get for having shitty support for PC gamers!
Viva la pc gaming!
That's part of the problem with XBox Live - if you want to run a subscription-based game, Microsoft isn't fond of running those over Live due to the added load and continual updates. The idea of paying for a subscription to Live and then paying a subscription to the game also doesn't gel with people very well.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
There's always been a weird back and forth between consoles and computers. The first computer I ever played on was an Atari ST and it had a slot for cartridges. You could play video games on it like your standard Atari or run software and it all plugged into the same television.
By the time we got to the NES and SNES era there was a real divergence between PC and console games. Consoles had faster and flashier graphics but PC's really had the edge in more complex games. Flight sims, Sierra adventure games, complicated wargames, etc, you really couldn't do this on the console.
By the Playstation era there started to be a real give and take between PC and console. You could get your Tomb Raider on a console or you could get it on the TV. The rule of thumb is a good graphics card would cost you as much as the whole console. If you wanted 3D games, you should stick with the console. The PC might look better but you paid through the nose for it.
The other big advantage of a console is that you are off the upgrade treadmill. A console will play this year's hottest title for several years until the release of the new console. Buy a fancy computer in January and you might not have the horsepower to play the latest game with all the bells and whistles in December.
Having a stable hardware platform isn't just beneficial for the customer, it's a lifesaver for the publishers. PC games have always been a nightmare to support because of the million and one configurations that could be encountered out there.
Can you imagine the nightmare of introducing a gaming PC standard like this and then watching the general public go nuts trying to deal with the result? Computer gamers were typically computer geeks first and foremost so we liked fiddling with all the gnarly little bits to get games up and running. We came to expect complications. It was all part of the masochistic challenge. Would the average console gamer enjoy the thought of coming home with a game and knowing he's going to spend the first night just trying to get the bastard to work correctly?
And like the other poster said, the Activision president is a motherfucker. If he's for something and it makes him happy, it probably involves fucking somebody's mother. You should be concerned.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
A big issue holding back PC gaming, in comparison to consoles, are standards-related.
For a console game, developers know exactly the hardware environment they'll be running on. They don't have to deal with a myriad of drivers, set-ups, and configuration issues. Neither do their customers... being tech-savvy isn't a requirement to play.
This can be solved with standards. Using the xbox as an example...
You buy a computer, certified to run the xbox and xbox360 virtual machines, from Dell. Developers code for those standards, knowing the game will run and how well it will run. You simply start your xbox 360 VM, insert your disk, and off you go. Power users are welcome to configure their graphic/sound/etc options via menu choices.
Pretty funny since Activision got its start making games for the Atari 2600.
Yes but those people don't reasonably expect those handhelds to play Crisis. The parent chose to use that game as the qualifier which is what I was responding to.
I have said for a long time that console manufactures are to short sighted with the hardware they develop and release. Sony and Microsoft have hardware platforms that are capable of so much more with very simple editions to the software and/or hardware that would allow them to replace many functions people use 3rd party hardware for today. A PlayStation or Xbox with a couple of TV tuner card slots, wired/wireless keyboard, mice and joysticks, a very large HDD and the ability to run apps from a 'open' market place would allow for people to get one machine that replaces the family desktop, DVR, cable box, and be a gaming machine. Add a DVI port and you can just as easily put it on your desk for office work like a standard PC (MS could offer Office Suite on theirs) making it more capable that many low end desktops for about the same price. I feel like Sony and MS really have missed the market they could take with these things. Sure it's not Activision's goal exactly, but if MS and Sony had really pushed their hardware platforms they might have taken the market share from PC manufactures for most home sales, leaving the two of them the dominate platforms. Allowing TIVO and the cable companies to keep the DVR, and desktop manufactures to be the domain of the keyboard, mouse and productivity apps really leaves them as nothing more than a expensive toy for gamers, where having it all would be a cheap alternative for people that want a DVR and cheap low end home PC, getting the gaming platform would be a bonus but it will lead to more game sales.
Sounds more like the XBox, which was a console made out of PC components. And the moment it starts blurring the line, you have console users complaining that your box is too hard, and PC users saying your box is too dumb.
Stop. Now.
Do you see what I did there?
After this generation of consoles, this makes a lot of sense. This is the first time since before the Saturn and Playstation, possibly since before the SNES, that it has been unambiguously better to play games on the PC than on consoles.
First of all, there have been no absolute must-have awesome games on any system that have not also appeared...BETTER...on the PC.
Then there's the fact that this is the first generation of consoles where patches have been common. Why even bother with uniform hardware if you can't get the damn game right on the first release? On the PC, there's an excuse...there are millions, maybe billions, of possible hardware configurations, and you can't be compatible with all of them. On consoles, there are what, maybe half a dozen? I don't know whose fault this is, though...is it Sony and Microsoft (have there been any such incidents on the Wii?), is it the developers, or is it both?
Then there's the cost. PC gaming always used to be more expensive than consoles. When this generation of consoles came out, it was possible to get a credible gaming PC for about the same cost as the PS3, and a little bit more than an Xbox 360. That's total. When you consider that most people already have a computer of some kind, that gap narrows, because the cost of going from an internet-and-office PC to a gaming PC is less than the cost of one of those systems NOW. There really isn't much reason why the 360 and PS3 couldn't fill the non-gaming roles of a PC, but hey, as long as they don't, the advantage goes to the PC.
You may notice that most of this doesn't apply to Nintendo. But the Wii has the distinction of being the shittiest gimmicky shovelware platform in history. Imagine if most of the NES's games had revolved around R.O.B. or the Power Glove. That is the Wii.
So yeah, screw consoles. They have abandoned their traditional advantages, and taken on the disadvantages of the PC.
Really, a world of random computer spec's is preferred by the game developer over a game console with static specs?
I agree that the game console does not change as quickly as the PC, but when you have to make a game work well on something costing $100 when you really want the game to run on a $5000 machine, sorry, I can't believe a game developer prefers this.
A PC is an infinite target, game consoles are single point targets. Sure there might be 5 different console platforms to target, but that is a far cry from millions of variations.
This sounds like a statement coming from a manager (save money) rather then a developer (save sanity).
So, let me get this straight: You found your company on the concept of making PC games, and become famous for making good PC games. When the openness of PC gaming leads to piracy, you abandon your loyal PC gaming fans to make console games, citing insufficient profits, and then half-assedly attempt to placate your now-abandoned loyalist PC gamers with a shitty console port.
Then, when Blizzard, the one company in the entire world who didn't succumb to the bullshit you did, starts to turn significant profit in return for their diligent work for the PC, you immediately spin around and try and jump on the bandwagon again, as if nothing happened?
Fuck you, Bobby Kotick, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
... and I believed this was about looking for a more powerful platform and new interactive concepts.....how naive... when you look into it, it's just lust for more money again... yaawwwwnnn.... booooring.... sure... subscription plans are exciting... at least to them... count me in... sure...
people don't reasonably expect those handhelds to play Crisis
...Core: Final Fantasy VII. Oh wait, they do.