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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?"
*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.
Microsoft spend >6 billion dollars building Xbox brand. They barely started making profit last year? (or maybe in 2011). It will take them ~6 more years to recoup this investment.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
You can't prove something is profitable by making a statement about its revenues. If you look at the divisional earnings over the last 5 years it hovers around the $0 mark - profits in some quarters, losses in others - and the console segment is the least reliable earner in that division.
This. Having spent quite a lot of the last month trying to beat compiler output with hand-crafted assembly for vector math operations, I think I can confidently say that it is possible but almost certainly not worth it. The possible gains are minimal, even with the (fairly mediocre) VC++ 2010 compiler, and the effort required to get there is astronomical. Face it: the compiler knows, much better than you ever will, which instructions are faster, which combinations of instructions are faster, which ordering of instructions will be faster...
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Article summary should be re-written;
Console market isn't profitable because there are few games being made gamers want.
Fixed that. Seriously, Xbox one is being marketed not as a gaming console but a dvr.
Except that its:
a) Not being marketed at all yet
b) Explicitly described as not having DVR capabilities
So you're wrong on both counts. Guess you've got a case of the Tuesdays.
The funny thing here is that consoles nowadays are more open than they've ever been. Prior to the PS3/360/Wii generation, if you wanted to develop for a console, the manufacturers would usually require that you be an actual business, have a physical office, and pay tens of thousands of dollars for special development kits. Even if you could do that, publishing a game was even harder, because you had to secure a contract with one of the big publishers and then pay even more money to cover the costs of a physical production & distribution run.
Nowadays, all of the big console companies are pretty friendly for indie developers. Development kits are cheap enough that a couple of guys in a garage can afford them, and digital distribution makes self-publishing your game cheap and almost risk-free.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Most of the loss of split screen is because it was beginning to get too difficult to afford the processing power.
What a load of apologist horse shit.
So you're telling me that an N64 with its sub-100MHz processor and very limited 3d rendering hardware was somehow able to do 4-way split screen but newer consoles just can't possibly handle it? That they can't tweak the settings to sacrifice just a bit of detail to have 2-4 players on the screen?
It's entirely due to laziness and greed, and because gamers are too pathetic to demand better.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal