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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.
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.
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.
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."
- 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....
because they are based on Adobe Flash! That's why people are so vocal about iPhone not having Flash because it's the leading platform for "low spec" PC games... sure the graphics are simple, but it's the same game everywhere. There are far more people playing Scrabble, Farmville, or Bejewled for 15-30 minutes at a time than playing the "AAA" console games.