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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
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.
Because the free market decided that selling console hardware as a loss-leader and trying to make up for it in game licenses and market share was a good business model. The problem is, it was a horrible business model and was doomed from the start.
...
The problem is, "people" want a cheap console and don't appear to be fazed by rip-off game prices. This has been proven over the years.
Don't those two statements contradict each other? As long as people want a cheap console, and don't mind paying big money for games, then selling hardware as a loss-leader is a very sound business model. It worked for at least three generations of hardware.
It may cease to work in the current climate, but I think that's because people's desires have changed, and gaming has become cheap and practical on ubiquitous general-purpose hardware. That is, people buy an iPad or an Android tablet for other reasons, and find they can buy adequate games for less than $2 a pop.
You do realize that if you adjust for inflation, Pitfall! for the Atari 2600 was a $90 game, right?
And Secret of Mana for the SNES would be about $130 in today's dollars?
Ridge Racer for the Playstation would be about $75 today.
Game prices are lower now than ever before, which is why you're seeing so much DLC and the like trying to eke out a few more bucks on the same engine/game.
My one year old Ubuntu 12.10 laptop plugs into my TV through HDMI 2.0. With a wireless keyboard and mouse, or using my PS3 controller, it's far superior to my PS3, and has better hardware specs than the Xbox One.
Sorry console loses again.
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.
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.
Call me when it's the rich people being shot when bad unemployment drives murder rates up.
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.
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