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Console Manufacturers Want the Impossible?
Phopojijo writes "Consoles have not really been able to profitably scale over the last decade or so. Capital is sacrificed to gain control over their marketshare and, even with the excessive lifespan of this recent generation, cannot generate enough revenue with that control to be worth it. Have we surpassed the point where closed platforms can be profitable and will we need to settle on an industry body, such as W3C or Khronos, to fix a standard for companies to manage slices of and compete within?"
Quite a bold statement that the console market isn't profitable, where is your source for this? MSFT posted Q1 2013 earning for the Entertainment and Devices Division:
"generated revenues of $2.53 billion for the quarter, up 53 percent from the same period a year ago. The division includes the Xbox business and Microsoft said there is now 46 million people signed up to use its Xbox Live online service, up 18 percent from the same period a year ago."
Seems pretty damn lucrative to me...
*blink* *blink* No... I'm pretty sure Sony and Microsoft are making lots of money off licensing, game sales, and content distribution. The point is that the hardware itself doesn't need to be profitable.
They want:
- top dollar for their hardware (even if it is lacking in horsepower or hard drive space)
- high game prices (of which they want a higher percentage)
- high monthly fees for the privilege of playing those games
- lots of DLC that they get a piece of
- draconian DRM & no used game sales
- customers who won't complain about the shitty service and performance of their oversold networks
Not to mention that they want none of this for their competition.
It's probably not a coincidence that the PS4 and Xbox One are both running x86 chips inside them. Aside from a few choice bits, developing on each machine should be incredibly similar to the point where it's just a different API for either.
The best part is that this should translate equally well to the PC industry. If Valve does the SteamBox right, we might just have that "standard" the article is clamouring for. If Valve mandates that a certain level of Steambox has at least an 8-core x86 CPU with a GPU of equivalent power and 8GB of RAM (or better yet, convinces AMD to release an SoC similar to what's inside the PS4), we'll have 3 very different platforms that are easy to develop for, even easier to port to and a golden age of gaming where your platform of choice won't massively impact the games you can play.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
All consoles are irrelevant.
Obey the PC Master Gamer race!
We already have that, it's called a PC. All you need is to tweak the OS a bit. Guess who is working on that? Steam. Remind me again, why would I want a console?
No.
Why wouldn't 'we' let the free market decide?
The only story here is that Apple's closed i-device ecosytem is outcompeting Sony's Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox closed ecosystems.
The death of closed platforms is a nice fantasy, but it won't happen as long as typical consumers continue to be lazy asshats who would rather buy an app from an app-store than write one themselves.
seriously, who has the money nowadays to waste on gaming equipment? i'm just trying to avoid eating dogfood casseroles
From what MSFT is pulling with the Xbox One all I see is the end of console gaming.
Game prices are already out of control, $80.00 for a new release is criminal. $60.00 is borderline criminal. Couple with that the new "no used, no borrowing" stance the game companies desperately want to put in place and all I see is consoles coming to an end.
I will Tolerate no loaning and no used if the games cost $20.00 to me, but I guarantee that the next games for the new consoles will start at $100.00 for new releases.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Endtothesystem. Endtothesystem. Endtothesystem. Endtothesystem.
That is INSANE. W3C moves at an absolute snail's pace to ratify anything, so handing over a market that is as bleeding-edge focused as gaming consoles would be suicide. The same would be true of just about any consortium formed to do the same. There would be too much red tape, and too many competing interests to make it work.
What does "to fix a standard for companies to manage slices of" mean? Fix an existing standard? Slices of what? This is remarkably garbled even for Slashdot.
I believe that, in this context, "to fix" means to set, make rigid or permanent, or to make fixed.
So an American corporation takes a long view on a business proposition rather than playing the short con quarterly filing scams, and this is a bad thing?
Remember when that's the way business worked? Microsoft (at least, this division) is actually doing it right, and not bending to the whims of shareholders and 10Q filings with the SEC.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The problem is not a lack of standards: even in the last generation, game makers managed to paper over that with cross-platform engines. The problem is that HD has made games inherently too expensive to produce. Even shovelware on the Wii turned out to be more profitable than even most of the blockbusters, which is why companies (most notoriously Ubisoft, but others as well) used it to fund their unprofitable HD development.
No amount of standardization will fix this, because while standards do fix a problem, it's not the right problem domain. The art department is incurring the big costs nowadays, not the code. This is like performing micro-optimizations in the wrong loops.
The manufacturers may not realize it yet, but they are destroying the value of their hardware and games. That is, the customer's PERCEIVED value of what they are buying.
I still have a PS2 with a bunch of games, and it still gets plenty of use. It doesn't plug into the internet, thankfully, and none of the games need patching. It doesn't have features that might be disabled later, or adverts. There is no monthly fee. The console and the games are mine until they break, hopefully not for a long time. IT'S MINE.
I held off on buying a PS3 or Xbox 360 for a long time, mostly because I didn't like the idea of firmware updates, user tracking and monthly fees. These consoles could theoretically be bricked by the manufacturer at any time with a buggy OS update. The local multiplayer functions were stripped away from many games to promote online gaming. I only own those consoles and games at the whim of the manufacturer and the games publisher.
The Xbox One - forget it. Quadruple the power from the cloud indeed - more like "your games are guaranteed not to work once we switch our servers off". The statement "I bought an Xbox One" has become meaningless. "I bought a box of electronics that only plays games when I have access to a reliable high-speed internet connection, so long as nobody hacks Microsoft's servers, Microsoft don't go bankrupt, or Microsoft don't decide that I have broken their TOS and brick my console. Oh, and the games will only work if you follow a bunch of rules made up by the publisher, who can decide to stop any or all of their games working whenever they like."
That isn't a description of a game or a console that I can "own". This will filter down into the public perception, given the inevitable "geek rage" from early adopters. The "rent a game that we can switch off any time" business model will bite them hard, and the perceived worth of a games disc will plummet. Once non-hardcore gamers stop paying $60 for Call of Duty 16, the console industry as we know it is finished.
We are in the embedded sector as well. With the added constraints on these systems its always good to have what will be generated in mind. We aren't all procedural dinosaurs either, Knowing the assembler generated for OO and functional patterns is important too. I find knowing how to read assembler for your platform can still be important just for debugging purposes. Writing it not so much, as the optimizers have gotten so good. Those same optimizers are kind of screwy at times though, I've heard of cases where moving a statement with no effect on the other statements on an inner loop around within that inner loop dramatically altered performance with the VS optimizer. PPC optimizers are not quite as smart, but they are (slightly) more predictable as well. Also PPC assembler isn't as painful to read, though there are at least 3 ways to do anything, there have been chips that reduced the redundancy, but someone would always complain.
Also the game modding community, my dad does that, and he can look at x86 assembler and see c code.
As far as instruction goes, schools still teach courses using 68000 and MIPS assembler at the university I went to, at least a couple years ago anyway.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
It is bad on Slashdot. People here love to hate MS, so if MS takes the long view on something, that's bad. If they take the short view on something else, that's also bad. It is a matter of zealotry, not fact.
In fact MS has been good at the long view idea for quite some time. When they get in to a market, often their first showing isn't that impressive. Many companies who do that say "Oh well, guess we can't compete," and fold. MS sticks with it, keeps improving, keeps trying. They don't always do that, and when they do they don't always succeed, but they've done it a lot.
Games now are cheaper than they were when they were on the SNES. $50 in 1993 dollars is like $78 today. Also budgets for games have gone WAY up.
Also I'm not sure where you are getting $80 for new releases (presuming we are talking US dollars). $60 is what games seem to be going for checking stores currently.
I do agree the no used games thing is bullshit, and I'm hoping someone takes them to task on that (sounds like the EU may) however the pricing is not out of line. Making a game isn't cheap, and they tend to provide pretty good entertainment for the money. If you want cheaper games, with lower production values, you can have that too with indy games and B-list publishers like Paradox Interactive. However with first flight games, well the cost has to be paid somehow.
The Playstation 3 was launched in 2006, the Playstation 2 was in 2000 playstation was launched in 1994. Xbox was 2001, xbox 360 was 2005. Similar time frames were with Nintendo about 6 years between consoles.
So an extra 1-2 years between generations is excessive?
I think people have this all wrong.
Everybody assumes that because a billion people have an iPhone or iPad and they play "games" on it, this means that game consoles are dead.
However, these "open" gaming platforms have done one thing, they have gamified billions.
What they have done is exposed billions to games that otherwise would never have bothered to buy a game console in the past to play a game.
Gaming is like crack. You start off with a little taste, but eventually you want more and a stronger dose.
Someone playing Angry Birds is going to get bored of it after a while, and when there is just a bunch of Angry Bird knock offs along with a slew of other tepid offerings available on the iDevice platform, people are eventually going to grow tired of it and want more.
Now enter a new generation of game consoles that not only offer games with far more entertainment value, but also a slew of connected and smart services that currently require a handful of different devices to access.
I am not saying a billion people are going to jump into game consoles, but there are millions and millions of people that have been newly exposed to games over the last 5 years through their phones and tablets that are going to want to check out what a game console can offer.
You can argue that game consoles have always been a niche market. In no generation of game console has there been more then maybe 100 - 200 million units sold, the current gen (Wii, PS3, 360) have sold over 250 million units combined, and that does not include the handheld market. So while sales are not in competition with phones or tablets, sales HAVE grown between generations.
So, while everyone is evangelizing the death of the game console, I think they are set for a huge boom because more people are gamified now than ever before, and eventually some of them are going to want to do more then flick raster birds at pigs. Sony and Microsoft (and sigh, even NIntendo) are going to be sitting there waiting for the sames to come over the next 5 - 8 years when people get bored of the same derivative games available on their phones and tablets.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Dude. I am an systems architect/programmer with an advanced degree, a liberal, a socialist even. I also support the right to bear arms and own several of them, including an "assault rifle". When the plutocrats and theocrats finish ruining this country, you will regret it if you don't have the arms to fight back.
Call me when it's the rich people being shot when bad unemployment drives murder rates up.
It seems to me that consoles are under attack from two different directions. The casual gamers have mostly defected to smartphones and tablets, and when they do need something hooked up to a TV, the Nintendo Wii seems to be their first choice. (Take a look at Wikipedia's list of best-selling video games – the Wii absolutely demolishes the competition in that console generation.) These games don't have much processing power, but that doesn't matter. All that matters to casual gamers is if the games are fun to play.
The hardcore gamers tend to prefer a PC running Steam, since this gives much more flexibility and power – they can choose their own configuration, game with multiple monitors if they want, and get better graphics than any console can provide. They do trade off cost and energy usage, but generally don't care about those things.
With the hardcore market dominated by Steam and the casual market dominated by Apple/Android/Nintendo, there isn't much room for Sony and Microsoft consoles.
how does a company sacrifice capital? I didn't understand the article. Not sure how a company could sacrifice the capitals in The United States including Washington, District of Columbia, Pago Pago, Fagatogo, Hagåtña, Saipan, San Juan, Charlotte Amalie.
The last time the industry tried this, it failed to gain any real traction.
Just imagine Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony sitting at a table to decide on specifications. Let's just, for a moment, imagine they can agree on the hardware specifications.
Now, think about them trying to agree on controller design.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
It took MSFT 3 years for the Xbox360 to stop being a loss leader (each console sold for less than what it cost MSFT to make it), it took Sony 5 years for the PS3 to stop being a loss leader
The consoles yes. But there are a lot of other factors like licensing/% of game sales, and I'm fairly sure MS has been raking in the cash with xBox live sales
draconian DRM & no used game sales
Draconian DRM & a cut of all used game sales in perpetuity.
The PC market is currently losing money for most manufacturers as well.
They both still function perfectly, just like with a PC you can't enjoy online content like multiplayer gaming
The problem comes when a developer decides that all multiplayer must be online. A lot of games don't support split screen, and one Xbox 360 game even requires an online pass to activate LAN multiplayer.
I can get an 8-core Bulldozer for a decent price.
But can you get an 8-core Bulldozer in a case that fits in well next to a living room television set, with a preloaded user interface that can be operated entirely with a gamepad, and with a wide variety of games that support multiple gamepads?
Top it off with the heavy focus on DRM (required internet, the whole used games thing)
Which PCs had before consoles ever since Half-Life 2 introduced Internet activation of single-player mode.
The mobile market does what Nintendo did with the Wii and the DS.
In a way it does, with the low-budget snack-size games, but in another significant way it does not. Wii U and Nintendo 3DS at least have traditional console controls to fall back on in addition to the touch screen. Phone games that aren't point-and-click have to fall back on awkward swiping gestures across a flat sheet of glass to emulate a gamepad and buttons.
In MMOs the lack of content is made up for by delaying the player with [what TV Tropes calls "twenty bear asses" quests] but this pattern has been adopted in so many single player RPGs as side-quest filler content that I in general am very disappointed with the genre as of late.
It's been in single-player JRPGs since Dragon Warrior on the NES to discourage rental.
You keep using that meme, I do not think it means what you think it means.
FC Closer
Dude. I am an systems architect/programmer with an advanced degree, a liberal, a socialist even. I also support the right to bear arms and own several of them, including an "assault rifle". When the plutocrats and theocrats finish ruining this country, you will regret it if you don't have the arms to fight back.
If the country is ruined why would we want to live to see the darkest days? I mean it's over already...
even Europe overtook Japan
"Europe" is not as unified of a market as USA or Japan. It has several single-country ratings organizations, which run up the overhead of a release and occasionally result in outright bans. it has a lot fewer players per language than USA or Japan, which increases the cost of translation and often requires hiring a set of voice actors per language.
By "a small minority that can't accept change" do you refer to developers who refuse to add same-screen or System Link multiplayer, or do you refer to gamers who demand same-screen or System Link multiplayer? If the latter, then how would it have improved, say, the Street Fighter series to require a separate console, TV, and copy of the game for each of two players?
Better native PC OS support for analog controllers and other input devices for PC's is another.
Windows has supported USB game controllers through DirectInput since 1998 and XInput since 2005. The problem is that until 2007, virtually no home had a TV-sized monitor that could accept the EDTV or HDTV signals coming out of a video card. Most TVs didn't go higher than 15.7 kHz horizontal, while even VGA was twice that. Computer monitors could accept higher resolution signals, but the monitors of that era were typically 17", which is only big enough for one person to physically fit around. A few video cards of the era had composite out, but those were far from standard, and I don't remember ever seeing a major PC maker market its product for this sort of home-theater use. Thus games with a heavy offline multiplayer component, such as fighting games and party games, tended to go to consoles because that's where the big enough displays were.
I havent seen a programmer that had a clue as to what the ASM output will look like
Maybe the people competing in demo competitions ?
But then the demoscene never really took off outside mainland Europe.
Or do they go directly for Assembler, especially in contests with like 2KB or 64KB executable size.
Development for retro consoles such as the NES commonly results in 16 to 64 KiB executables as well.
a golden age of gaming where your platform of choice won't massively impact the games you can play.
Um, that age started in 2003.
Good luck finding a good selection of fighting games, party games, and cooperative platformers for the PC. Anything that uses more than one gamepad tends to be console specialties.
Where were you when games shifted from PCs to consoles, a vastly inferior game design and experience? Playing a FPS with a clumsy controller instead of keyboard and mouse is like building a ship in a bottle
It really depends on the genre. Trying to play a fighting game with a keyboard and mouse instead of two controllers has its own problems. A lot of games that aren't FPS, RTS, or MMORPG get released for consoles instead of PC and mobile because they can't expect PC or mobile users to already own a game controller or to buy a $60 controller just for a $3 game.
Remember Mechanical Games? Dedicated machines for implementing one game: Basketball, Hockey, Pinball, etc.
Remember Arcade Cabinets? Dedicated Gaming Rigs in a Box. They were specialized to their task, but the hardware inside could run more than one game program. Their customizable form factor could provide better gaming experiences for many games. Even more general purpose hardware, consoles, which could run a gamut of games more cheaply came along. Then consoles met and surpassed the performance of Arcade cabinets. The arcade cabinets slow hardware cycle meant they couldn't take advantage of Moore's Law as easily, and the consoles were more accessible to play -- Being in your house.
For a while personal computing devices were sub-par to consoles in terms of game performance. Now, however, the guts are nearly exactly the same. The glacial console cycle means that PCs can more effectively take advantage of Moore's Law. Also, you're not going to replace a PC with a Console -- Especially not a Mobile Personal Computer. PCs can be even more accessible -- Fitting in your purse, backpack or even pocket today. If you do try to compete with a PC then you need to do everything the PC can do, thus turning into a general purpose personal computer. Now, reference the features of the consoles over time -- Note that they are slowly becoming PCs...
The main difference between a PC and a Console is that PCs provide a common API to a wide range of hardware. This allows programs to be cross platform. The main secondary difference is that a PC can be used to create new software on. For these reasons Smartphones, Tablets, and Consoles can not supplant the PC... If they do gain these features then they will actually become PCs.
The main problem with consoles is that they are set exactly opposed to the progress of the Games Industry they purport to support. What is best for Game Developers and Game Players is if all games can run everywhere forever. What is best for Console Sales is if games only run on one platform for a limited amount of time. What was best for Arcade revenue was if the games could even be geographically exclusive.... Exclusivity didn't work out so well. Inclusivity and common software API -- More General Purpose -- has been winning the Game Wars since the first digital hardware that could run more than one game program. Consoles are holding back the game industry, they must, that is the nature of a closed platform that does not play nice with others.
Unfortunately, a lot of the examples you cite won't be helpful to an HTPC maker trying to compete with Xbox One and PlayStation 4. "WinXP under a VM" requires Windows XP retail install media and a Certificate of Authenticity, which a lot of people don't already have. Users would end up confused as to which games work in Wine and which don't. Nor can an HTPC maker advertise compatibility with ROMs for Nintendo platforms without running the risk of getting sued for inducing copyright infringement. An Ubuntu HTPC maker would have to stick to games in Ubuntu's apps directory, NES homebrew, Steam for Linux, GOG, Humble Bundle, and what else?
For about ten of those 15 years, from 1997 through 2006, there was a frequency mismatch between 480p-1024p RGB outputs on PCs and 480i composite inputs on SDTVs. PCs in general didn't come with composite output as a standard feature to the point where any PC sold at Best Buy would work with the TV that one already owns. And despite PCs having supported HID joysticks since about 1998, PCs haven't shipped with a user interface mode designed for gamepad operation.
Plug the computer into the tv...
There's a wall in the way. The family PC is on a desk in another room.
I'd like to point out that my Dad had a 72" rear projection TV 15 years ago that didn't have an HDMI input.
That's still not the excuse. Last time I checked, Sewell Direct was selling VGA to composite converters for $30. Official component cables for seventh-generation consoles tended to cost that much. The real excuses are lack of a ready-made name-brand PC in a home-theater-friendly case and tradition.
The ONLY genre not helped by a M&K is racing games
I find your thesis interesting and would like to discuss PC control methods for genres that have been traditionally console-heavy. How would Super Mario Bros. or Mega Man or Castlevania have been played with a mouse? Or Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat or Smash Bros.?
and those you'd need a steering wheel, also available on PC.
PCs don't ship with a steering wheel. PS3 and Wii, on the other hand, ship with an accelerometer controller that substitutes for one. Even tablet games use the accelerometer to steer.
We already have a set of 'standards' for gaming...It's called PC gaming.
Nintendo is doing fine. I'm not even sure Sony and Microsoft are losing cash.
We don't need some dumb government oversight, ok? It's just fucking consoles, there's only a few companies competing, and two of them suck at making consoles. The market will solve this just fine.
The Wii U is reported to be profitable after 1 game purchase. IIRC the Wii was profitable from launch and the Gamecube was profitable after 2 game purchases. Since most people by 3-5 games minimum, they always turn a profit. It has only been Sony and Microsoft that have to slash prices repeatedly to try and push sales along and make it up with subscription plans, and so on.
Of course neither Sony nor Microsoft is making big profits on their game consoles... Microsoft broke their way into the arena by dumping cheap hardware onto the market, so Sony is forced to cut their prices to stay alive and not become the next Sega.
But if the article's premise is true (that neither Nintendo nor Microsoft is really going to be a direct competitor to Sony in the next gen) then Sony's fate is looking-up, as without competitors, they won't need to cut prices to the bone to keep their market alive and well. They can tag an extra $50 onto the PS4's price tag, and people will just keep buying them, Sony's profits go up, and all is well. Supply and demand works like it always has.
There's no such thing as a product without competition that can't turn a profit...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I've had to deal with assembly language stuff for x86, powerpc, mips, and arm. Among other things, I've found bugs in the locking in glibc and in the kernel.
While this sort of stuff takes some experience, I wouldn't call it "uber" level....any reasonably proficient programmer could wrap their heads around it if they tried.
For "uber" programmers, I'd point to the core kernel developers, the core X/Wayland developers, the core glibc developers, and presumably the core OSX/Windows developers.
What a nice offtopic, bullshit, personal agenda rant. You're either trolling, stupid, or both.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
The problem is that investments are intended to pay off. For something like a power station it's unlikely that it'll go out of fashion or that a new and better kind of electricity will come out and make it obsolete, so 20 years down the line it's a fair bet that it'll still producing revenue.
Do you think the console market works like that? Look at consoles that were around twenty years ago - how many are still in production & how much new software is being written for them?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What exactly is a frist psot?
It's a way for bitches like you to reply to obvious trolls so you can post your little bullshit opinion near the top of the page.
A wall is only a hindrance if you haven't got the proper tools ;)
And the proper permit. Some landlords might not like holes drilled through the walls, and some jurisdictions require a licensed and bonded electrician to pull any sort of cable through the walls. People buy consoles as a workaround for cost-prohibitive permits.
you will regret it if you don't have the arms to fight back.
Libya.
You can not fight back and win, all you can do is destroy your nation to the point that the ruling class no longer care to rule it or things get so bad for the working class that they leave. Revolution simply is not possible in an age of fully automatic railguns mounted on ships 50 miles off shore that can hit a target hundreds of miles way with pinpoint accuracy. You might as well fight with lawn darts.
Given that the ability to hold our government accountable is laughable, that excuse is invalid. There simply is no valid reason to allow the common untrained, uninsured, and unlicensed citizen the ability to purchase and carry around with them a remote killing device able to mow down dozens of people in seconds.
I bought several PS3's to do development. I wanted to experiment with the Cell processor. Of course I also wanted them to play blueray movies.I found the games available did not interest me. I waited what seemed like two years for the @home feature to go on line and finally gave up. Eventually Sony declared they were losing money on each console that had to be made up for in game sales. I say too bad for them if they didn't charge enough to pay for the manufacturing of the device. Around the time I decided to focus on yellow dog linux and experience the console's cell processor, they pushed through an update that removed the 2nd OS option forever. It seems to me the price I paid for my original PS3 units was substantial. Sony struggled to keep control of the marketshare in various ways including bait and switch. I am unimpressed and will be boycotting them for the rest of my days.
Either or fallacy, your point is invalid.
I brought an [something ... have to go check ... a Wii, judging from the box on the shelf behind me] 4 or 5 years ago ; decided it was crap ; was about to try selling it to de-clutter the garage ; decided to hook it up again to test before selling and found myself moderately amused by a £5 (USD ~8?) zombie-chopping game that I'd picked up second-hand at a charity shop while the machine was boxed up. So I've got it set up now, and finding it worth while keeping.
How is that an "excessive lifespan" ? It's lasted longer than most laptops (though with admittedly less usage) but is still a good 5 years short of the lifetime of my first computer.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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