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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.
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
Download patches as required
I never had to do that on my NES, SNES, Atari, Wii, Sega, gameboy, etc...
Downloadable patches is the current evil for console games, it ruins the "plugin and play" spirit. If you cannot supply patches you will make damn sure your game works. Yes, most oldies have a few bugs, but nothing that make the game unplayable, more glitches that require special actions. (super mario 1 - level -1, zelda links awakening - screen teleport glitch, pokemon - "missin no")
These days we have games that simply are unplayable unless you patch them, which is crazy.
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
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.
Console:
1. try to make out text that isnt aliased/sampled properly.
2. play for 5 minutes.
3. Level transition time, loading.
4. play.
5. load.
6. play.
7. load.
8. change disk.
9. load.
10. RROD.
11. vendor retroactively takes features.
12. game vendor nickels and dimes you for DLC.
13. after 13 DLC's at $5 each you finally have a full game.
PC
1. Set resolution to monitors native (most games do this automatically now).
2. Play.
3. Keep playing.
4. Holy crap, there's more then 4 hours of content in the game and no loading screen.
5. Enjoy quicksaving.
6. Get free content from the distributor (thanks valve and stardock).
7. Play the game 15 years later on your modern gaming PC.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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).
Today's games are 10000 times bigger.
Today's games are only 10,000 times bigger because of the higher-fidelity audio and higher-resolution graphics. The games themselves are not 10,000 times more complex, otherwise they'd be unplayable by humans, so they have no excuse to be any more unstable than their older counterparts.
Sorry, I agree with the GP... patchable console games make for shittier games because publishers are more inclined to say "she'll be right, we can patch it after release."
Todays games are larger, yes. But today we have different tooling.
Yes, it's not that hard to build a platform game like super mario 1. Unless you only have an assembler, 40K of ROM, 2K of RAM, a CPU at slightly less then 2Mhz and a GPU with some strict timing requirements.
Console.
1. Open tray
2. Close tray
3 Play
continue till bored.
PC
0. Make sure computer can actually run game, if not go out and buy more parts till it can. .......Crash
1 Open tray
2. Close tray
3. Install
4. Crash
5. Hunt for drivers.
6. Crash
7. Spend hours tinkering with options and settings to get a decent framerate and accecptable graphics
8. Crash
9. Spend hours trawling forums trying to pinpoint exact problem
10. Recify problems, change registry settings, reinstall game, reinstall drivers
11. Try Again
12. Crash
13. Repeat untill rage
14. Finally get game working to find any online portion is filled with 99% hackers, modders and general cheats.
15.
Hey this is fun.
http://pc.mmgn.com/Lib/Images/Gallery/full/7PLLYLB8.jpg
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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
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.
You've missed a large part of the OPs point! You say that QA testing spends much effort finding bugs and glitches but we both know that doesn't mean that the managers in charge are going to FIX them before the game ships!
If they don't fix an issue before the game ships then here comes....THE PATCHES!
Blergh.
Just because you can doesnt mean you should.
IMHO, Morrowind was a much more enjoyable game than Oblivion.
The primary difference? Oblivion had physics... you could knock stuff off the table.... thats the only benefit it added.
Meanwhile the physics resulted in ALL KINDS of problems. Players could no longer easily put things where they wanted them, sometimes the physics would screw up & stuff would go flying everywhere, stuff got lost behind a table & you couldnt get to it, the added cpu demands of the physics pushed sys reqs through the roof... etc etc etc
all so you could accidentally knock stuff off the tables.
Next time you're adding "A rigid body representation for the physics engine, including joint limit set ups etc." please please please take a moment & think about whether doing so actually adds anything to the gameplay.... or if you're just doing it because you can.