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Has the Console Arms Race Stalled?
An article at Eurogamer argues that even with a successor to the Wii on the horizon, the console arms race we've watched over the past few decades is in the process of changing dramatically, with base hardware taking a back seat to software and peripherals.
"Even the most basic yardstick for console improvements has become a little hard to read. It used to seem like a reliable idea that every five years or so, consoles would catch up to the PC — a platform which sees advancements every few weeks — and remain competitive for a while, before the PC's cutting-edge accelerated away. ... However, the upgrade cycle appears to have slowed considerably — with games that actually demand cutting-edge systems being few and far between, and core gamers far more likely to continue happily playing on two-, three- or even four-year-old PCs than they were in the past. ... If not a halt to progress, this is certainly a slowing — and probably one which is welcomed in most quarters. Consumers love improvements in graphical quality, but most would probably prefer to see any major increase in development budget being spent elsewhere — more detailed content, more expansive storytelling, more progress in areas that have been neglected in the former headlong rush to cram more polygons and effects onto every screen."
Yes it has.
I for one have never really seen the point behind spending thousands of (pounds/dollars) on a gaming pc capable of playing the latest games, only to be surpassed within a few months. As things currently stand, it's actually opening PC gaming to a far wider audience as the price of an adequate gaming rig is quite reasonable. Also, i'd rather have longer and better games than I would slightly better looking ones. And even still, games with modding support can often receive graphical boosts down the line anyway.
It's not really saying that the console arms race has stalled, but is instead saying that the graphics arms race has stalled, which is probably true, and that efforts are shifting, which is also probably true.
After all, just as dpi in printers stopped being a selling point once they all got "good enough", and just as megapixels are becoming increasingly irrelevant as a differentiating factor between cameras, so too are the graphics in today's games reaching a point where the return isn't worth the investment for the developers. Graphics are already "realistic enough" for most people, and trying to move things closer to photorealistic gameplay is probably not worth it, since the return they get is minimal, while the effort required is exorbitant. Instead, spending it on improved gameplay or other elements is a better return on their investment.
Games like Minecraft doing so well just hammers that point home.
They need give software a chance to catch up. Hardware is not the limiting factor anymore. It doesn’t take much crappy programming to trip you up when you are trying to render billions of pixels consistently within a small window of time, throwing in some network latency for good measure.
The Nintendo Wii and various versions of the handheld DS have outsold everything else so powerfully that companies are now forced to rethink their previous strategy of better hardware = better console. Given those factors and that the casual and 'family' gaming market has vastly overshadowed every other demographic and It's easy to see how the entire gaming landscape has changed since the PS2/XBOX/Gamecube generation. One rather bad downside to this trend is that shovelware is surging in this current generation, and has caused me to even stop buying games for my Wii. It's all obscure JRPG nonsense or movie games / shovelware. I haven't played my Wii in several months and do not plan to anytime soon, if I can smuggle it away from the GF I will probably sell it off cheap to a family who eats that crap right up. In case you couldn't tell I'm a PC gamer, which seems to be the only remaining platform for deep and intricate games. Even this is slowly withered by everything now having to be tailored for both the PC and consoles which usually leaves the PC port with the short end of the stick.
In terms of the graphics race, I think the next big thing to hit consoles(or gaming in general) would be Real-Time RayTracing. Consoles typically have specialized hardware(although they seem to be heading towards general-purpose these days), so a specialized RTRT chip wouldn't be out of the question if it were cheap enough and fast enough. Things like Caustic Graphics OpenRL come to mind.
Graphics aside, it's no secret that there's been a big change from a mantra of "quality, quality, quality" to "content, content, content"... and non-related content at that. A PlayStation did one thing - it played video games. The PS3 can do nearly everything... even function as a computer if you don't upgrade the firmware.
In prior years, it would take you at LEAST a week to finish a campaign on any respectable video game. These days, you can finish a video game completely in two days. Then spend five more days fiddling with the "bonus content". If they spent more time developing a good story as opposed to unlockables, that race may accelerate again. Developers aren't struggling to use the processing power they have at their disposal. There's no reason for innovation at this particular time.
We need to get back to a time where developing solid and expansive CORE content -- not extras -- was what mattered.
The Wii's successor is rumored to have more horsepower than the Xbox 360/PS3, so it's not like the arm's race is over. Sony and MS simply realized that hardware improvements that have been made possible in the past 6 years don't translate to drastically better graphics sufficient to get people to buy a new console yet. Also, Sony isn't looking forward to selling another $800 machine priced at $599.
It's easy to forget that 2 console generations ago, consoles output at 320x240 resolution. Now, console games can run at higher resolutions than many computer monitors. The obvious quality improvements that come with increased resolution aren't going to come again in the near future.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
... one of the real issues is risk aversion and title stagnation. Every modern game has to cater to the lowest common denominator due to game budgets, in a way the lust for pretty graphics has caused game developers to reduce the game aspect of games and simplify games to such an extent they become little more then stale worlds of aesthetically pleasing art. It's been a long time since I've seen game (not a movie or movie game as I like to call them) based on _just_ the idea of the game rather then going for the special fx and bling. Take the latest L.A. Noire, the more graphical horsepower has increased the less the focus is traditional games and more on cinematic experiences and IMHO that is a negative thing since the more passive games become the less interested I am.
It's one of the reason I can't stand modern "RPG's" there is barely any participation left because the action gaming mechanics have been ripped out of them to make sure people who don't like participating in their games can watch and run through the content. This is bad because it alienates what many of us got into gaming for in the first place - to participate rather then be pushed through content on a conveyor belt of automated-combat. FF12 takes the cake in what I consider the devolution of games where all you have to do is navigate once you set your auto-battle. At that point why even bother "gaming"? Why not just a walkthrough on youtube of someone else playing and get the same experience for $0 money down?
Graphics look amazing. Crysis on high-res looks like you could open the TV screen and pick a leaf off a tree. But the immersion factor of the gorgeous graphics breaks down when you try to play with them. When you shoot a car windscreen, and it doesn't break. Or shoot the tyres, and they don't pop. Or the gas tank and it doesn't explode.
Even sillier - shoot your AI squadmates in the head, and they just go "Ow, quit it!". Worse, you have a magic gun that won't let you pull the trigger if you're pointing it at a non-enemy. I played the opening level on Halo Reach, and was so bored when I got to the first farmer, that I just shot him in the head to shut him up so I could get on with alien-killing. Well, the gun went bang, and a blood-spatter hit the wall behind him, but he never missed a word of exposition. I shot him 10 times - the same thing happened. On the 11th shot, I just died. Up until then, my teammates hadn't seemed concerned about my actions, and they didn't actually take offence, just some mighty vengeful god struck me down until I agreed to play nice.
Or the world looks open and inviting, but you're just as much on rails as if you were playing some arcade light-gun game. Like Bad Company 2, where any deviation from the set path gets you a 5-second countdown to insta-death. Or Gears of War, where you're a grotesquely-muscled space marine who can be forced from his chosen path by three chairs piled on a table.
The thing is, many games have got bits of it right. Just Cause 2 gives you an enormous world, and near-total freedom within that world. Heavy Rain changes the gameplay based on your actions. The Witcher makes every choice have a consequence you might not like, but at least you get to make the choice. Modern hardware has the power to create incredible, immersive game experiences, but a lot of studios would rather make Big Guns, Shiny Metal 5 using a well-established engine because that's easier, cheaper, and practically guaranteed to sell to their target demographic.
Maybe the next arms race will be environment engines that come a little closer to replicating the properties of objects, so that glass always breaks, wood and cloth always burn, and you don't need the red key if you've got the rocket launcher.
Beyond increasing core counts (which appears mostly useless for most gaming engines beyond a couple), nothing much is doing in the world of CPUs these days.
I remember choosing between a 486 @ 25MHz versus 50MHz for an extra several hundred bucks. That's twice the clock speed within a single CPU generation for those who are keeping track.
A generation later I purchased a Pentium 75MHz, and 18 months after that upgraded it to 233MHz. That's triple the clock speed.
I even remember having a 400MHz Pentium (II I believe) and about a year later upgraded to a 1GHz P3. That's 2.5 times, not to mention the greater efficiency per clock of a P3 vs a P2.
I now sit with a nearly *5 year old* dual core 2.4GHz CPU (overclocked to 3.3GHz mind you) and I can't find even a $1000 CPU that will give me anywhere near a worthwhile performance bump for anything other than super specific parallelizable applications like scientific computations or workstation-style 3D rendering.
This transistor efficiency stall has also hit the GPU market in the past few years. Have a look at how much Nvidia or AMD have pushed top end GPU performance in the past couple years. They're making incremental 15-20% bumps per generation -- that's nothing like back in the TNT/3dfx days when you could count on a 50-100% framerate jump with each successive generation.
Consoles are stalled because GPU/CPU technology is stalled. If CPUs and GPUs were were keeping up with the previous pace from the 90s, we'd have software/games that pushed those limits.
The power you have from your dual core and graphics card, can now be had for half the electricity bill, probably less. True, if they could, they'd double performance and have you choose which one you wanted, but they did find a place where they could improve.
It may not mean much to you, but here, in Europe, we have significant taxes on electricity and it can save you US$100/month if you just turn off one of those heavy computers of yours. I used to have a few servers running in the meter closet for firewalling and fileserving. Right now, I have a WRTG for firewalling and a popcorn with a USB drive for files. This has taken my electricity bill down by over US$1000 per year.
Although I agree that game development has stalled and hardly uses the extra RAM and cores, I do think they will do so in the future. The better the physics models of the cars you emulate are, the longer you'll want to play the game. The more variation in any form of AI, the more fun you'll have playing. Running things like physics models or AI on separate cores will eventually make game play better. It's just a matter of time before game companies figure that out. Regarding revenue, I think WoW has figured out how to keep on making money from a game that essentially isn't that special.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The console arms race has stalled largely because the economy has stalled. Developing a console, investing in manufacturing facilities etc. is quite an expensive process, one that a company really doesn't want to go through unless they feel that they will be able to sell the console as well as a large number of games for it. In this economy, it's going to be very hard for people to rationalize plopping down $500 or $600 for a new console. Furthermore, since console hardware capabilities are (relatively) fixed, by the time the economy picks up again your competitor will be able to utilize the latest and greatest technology to come out with a console that is better than yours, and you will be stuck like that for the entire life cycle of the console. So there is actually a rather large disincentive to release a new console at this point. The risk to reward ratio is simply too great.
Monstar L
Don't forget, we also just came out of a crazy bad recession. This would have been a bad time to release a new console and it is harder for the companies to justify console development costs when investors are demanding cost cutting. Additionally, TSMC has been stuck for over a year on the 40 nm node. The cancellation of the 32 nm process may have impacted some of the plans of the console makers. If they were planning on a chip that simply wouldn't be feasible/economical without a die shrink, then now have to wait for 28 nm to become a widely available and high yielding process, but so far this process is not ready for production silicon. TSMC won't be able to produce the quantity or yield of parts that the console makers will need on 28 nm until at least early 2012.
With smartphones becoming the main computer for the general public (not the /. crowd of course) it's no surprise that phones will take over as the main game 'console' for consumers. Video Game companies are still coming to grip or flat out ignoring this reality and $1.99 games.
The HD is a mixed blessing. Sure - you get faster load times and you don't have to worry about disc wear. That's good.
But it also allows system upgrades/patches/install time/bugs and bug fixes. These were all problems PCs used to have that consoles didn't. And they suck. I hate buying a new game, coming home, being told my PS3 needs to update itself, then installing the game and being told the game needs to update itself. In the old days, when you sent your RTM build to the M, that was it. If you had a bug in the game, it would be there *forever*. If you had one bug that broke the gameplay, you had a ruined game. Testing was really important. So companies did it. Console gaming used to be a lot more user-friendly/bug free than PC gaming; because a PC game could be released *with bugs* and they'd just release a patch later.
From what I remember, Fallout 3 (while I loved the game) crashed all the friggin time until you had six months of patches applied to it. Before your console had a hard-drive and internet connection - that was a deal breaker. Now, well, just play your $50 game, crash, curse, wait a while, download, update, play some more, etc....
And it's not just issues with the individual games. It's the system itself. I *hate* buying a new a game, coming home, and being told I need to 'update my system'. What? I never, ever had to update my NES, SNES, SEGA, or GameCube. But now updating my PS3 is a regular occurrence. And look at all the problems that's caused - updates can actually take away functionality you already had (OtherOS). And, let's face it, at some point - you won't be able to update it anymore. Servers aren't free, and Sony has a long history of shutting down servers (without warning) when they weren't profitable. So, if you find an old PS3 in a box at some garage sale - you'd have a nightmare of a time figuring out what version firmware it has and what version is required by each game....I want to play Portal 3 - but that doesn't run unless the PS3 has Firmware 3.6 installed. And where on Earth can I find a 20 year old firmware update now that Sony has gone out of business/doesn't care?