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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
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.
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.
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.
The same thing happened to special effects on TV shows and in movies
True. Visual effects have become good, but not cheap. We no longer have movies with a "cast of thousands", we have animation staffs of thousands. Look at the credits.
About a decade ago, I was talking to a Hollywood director about this. He'd done some films that had live and animated characters interacting. The cost of doing that was high. He was hoping that, in a few years, he'd be able to make $100 million movies for $20 million. It's not working out that way.
There was hope for that in games. Procedural generation was going to make it possible to have huge cities without huge teams of artists building them. Didn't work out. SpeedTree can generate huge forests and outdoor scenes cheaply and well, so you can have a huge, mostly empty natural world like Red Dead Redemption. Cities, not so much. There was much interest in procedural city generation around 2009, but what comes out is usually only good enough to fly over.