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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.
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
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.
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).
"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
From all reports I have seen of late I would have to agree with the OP, They seem to be pretty well out of ideas as the user base has been rapidly shrinking. The upcoming XPac looks completely uninspiring and is unlikely to stem the hemoraging for any significant time. I say this as someone who still plays the game and is even on the beta, though the week on the beta has made me seriously question why I bother anymore.
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
I disagree on that, games themselves now ARE probably 10000x more complex.
Think of Mario:
One object which has to do some collision detection, movement and input, and some other things (koopa's) that just move about on one axis.
Think of GTA4:
A whole city where parts of it have hundreds of physics-enabled objects, some of which can be interacted with, destroyable cars, pedestrians, rubbish, along with complex missions (well, sorta), collision detection for both movement as well as shooting, and so on.
New games are a lot more complicated.
But that is no reason to just ditch quality assurance and ship a half-assed attempt at porting a game from console to pc, where everything must be set on low because the developers can't be assed to properly change code so it works reasonable on the pc.
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.
- a quaternion based animation blending and transitioning engine (and more importantly the tools to author the animation networks)
- Inverse Kinematics, aim/orient/point constraints
- 1000's of animation takes (our last title used approx 3000 animations per character)
- A rigid body representation for the physics engine, including joint limit set ups etc.
- A way to blend and transition back and forth between animation and physics (simple ragdolls aren't good enough anymore)
- The geometry & textures need to be authored by an artist(s)
- Vertex & Pixel Shader to render the character.
- Particle systems to generate smoke near the characters feet.
- A lodding system where number of bones in a character, geometry detail, etc can by changed dynamically.
- This data needs to hook into the collision, AI, and networking systems.
All of that has to run on the PS3, which means you need to use the SPE's (and the code most be heavily vectorised to make use of the altivec instruction set). This means all of that body of work has to be split up into lots of 256Kb chunks (for both code and data) so that you can schedule them to run on the SPEs. Finally you get to the really easy bit, rendering the data. That volume of work would take a team of 10 programmers about 3 or 4 years to complete.
Now lets compare that to how you'd do that for a 2D NES/SNES/Gameboy game:
- get an artist to draw some sprites.
- blit correct sprite to screen.
That should take an experienced programmer no less than half a day to write that. Art assets are certainly increasing in complexity, but the code complexity has exploded to another level completely.
because publishers are more inclined to say "she'll be right, we can patch it after release."
All games have to go through extensive QA testing, both in house, at the publishers, and at microsoft/sony/nintendo before the game gets gold status ready for release. This process alone can take anywhere from 6 months to 3 years. Unfortunately despite game teams best efforts, we can't catch all of the bugs, so patching a game after release has become a necessity.... I can assure all game teams want to get all bugs before a game is released. If you don't, you get bad reviews, and your sales suffer....
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
I can see you are a game programmer then.
Now lets compare that to how you'd do that for a 2D NES/SNES/Gameboy game:
- get an artist to draw some sprites.
- blit correct sprite to screen.
This might interest you then. I suggest you do some research on those platforms. The 'GPU' these consoles used are far from what you see these days. There is no blitting, you setup a bunch of memory and registers during VBlank and the GPU does the wonder of rendering for you, the whole screen. You don't say "sprite N at X,Y" every frame, no you setup the sprite once and then it keeps getting drawn there. Which is the easy part.
All special effects come from tricks, poking the right registers while the screen is being drawn, but in some cases this is only allowed during HBlank.
Also, don't forget that you only have an assembler, no high level languages. And limited amounts of debugging.
Now lets compare that to how you'd do that for a 2D NES/SNES/Gameboy game:
- get an artist to draw some sprites.
- blit correct sprite to screen
You must have seen some shoddy SNES games then. You should have been doing:
Write tool to correctly split up animated sprites to a number of hardware sprites, removing duplicates (including flips and palette shifts), sometimes even doing fuzzy matching (losing a stray pixel if they look close enough) and shifting the box placement around to minimise a vague combination of
Then obviously compress/decompress the sprites when going from ROM to VRAM using a standard algorithm. This pipeline took weeks to write, not a matter of half a day. Also it meant that even a straightforward SNES game could take nearly an hour to build the data on the PCs of the time, but if it saves the publisher from doubling the ROM size it would be worth it.
And most of the things you have mentioned (apart from the shaders and the physics middleware) were around on the N64 which has far less grunt and smaller programmer team size.
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?
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.
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.