Slashdot Mirror
Video Game Wars Aren't Always Games
Salon has a surprisingly deep article about how video game machine makers are engaged in a "War for America's Thumbs" and how their products are no longer just toys but are rapidly become multi-purpose electronic appliances. Greg Costikyan, who wrote the piece, is the author of Fantasy War and, Salon says, 26 other commercial games. Well worth reading!
I'm a little cautious about these all-in-one set top boxes that game companies are trying to produce. Sure, the main focus is still games, but here you have Dreamcast shipping with a modem, soon to get a zip drive, and PS2 playing DVD movies and having USB and Firewire support. The line between consoles and PC's seems to be blurring.
In fact, I think it always has. Just about everyt major game system at some point touted that they'd have a keyboard and a disk drive to make them more "computer like". Usually these things never shipped and when they did (SNES mouse for example) they failed miserably. The difference today is that a lot of these components are shipping WITH the system themselves, putting an emphasis on multi-use machines from the get-go.
But are consumers ready to adopt this? To me this is such a big gamble, especially with so many dismal failures in the past (3DO and CD-I come to mind), but I think now is the better time to take such a risk. Some people are more comfortable with the idea of surfing the web on their TV's (ala WebTV), so this isn't a new idea to most people. And most people have heard of DVD and know it's the way movies will go someday. However a lot of people (generally speaking) don't have WebTV or a DVD player. A lot more people (again, generally speaking) play games, and to get these options in a system that usually sells below cost (what a bargain!) is a dream come true.
The real test will be how companies like Sony and Sega market their machines after they catch on. Will they still be "game" machines, or will they be the "magic black (or offwhite) box" that sits in your entertainment stand and does it all? How they market this stage (along with how easy these things are to use) will be the difference in whether they get everyone to buy a system, or just those who want games. If anyone wins this race at all it'll be a huge marketing coup. If they all fail, it may be the end of the Set-Top box concept as we know it.
I think the key obstacle in the way of convergence is the television's poor resolution. Slashdot on a TV is unusable. Replace TVs with reasonable quality displays with 720 progressive or higher vertical resolution, and it's an acceptable monitor for most home users. Once video games can do HDTV out and HDTVs start becoming reasonably priced, that's when the line between the console and the computer becomes very fuzzy.
From the X-Box, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to make sure that if this happens, they're in position. It's surprising, given the expected timeline and the current pace of graphics chip turnover, specifics like the nVidia GeForce256 would be mentioned. I suspect, however, that's just linking the project to the hottest current 3-D chip, and the specific chip won't be chosen until the machine is closer to release.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The idea is simple: hardware and software has become so cheap, and internet access so ubiquitous, that the only two things people still care about are their peripherals and their precious data. Why update RAM when you'll need a new motherboard and CPU also to get your machine up to date? Heck, it'll all be obsolete soon enough anyway. The solution is easily removable hard drives (external SCSI? USB2?) so people can get their data moved over to a brand new box every couple of years whenever an app comes along they'd like (and that doesn't run on the old hardware). It'll still be a general purpose computer, but without the messy piecemeal upgrade path of current machines.
OS on a chip? Who cares. Just include an OS on every application CD and load it into memory. Far fetched? Maybe. But people in general only care about their data and the apps to modify said data. And PCs are getting more and more simplified every year...
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Has there ever been a non-gaming magazine/website article that got all the facts right? No. Be happy they got a lot of the main one's right. I've seen MUCH worse mangling than they did.
One on more clairification: In the story it states, Nintendo at one point said that Dolphin would, but now wavers on the issue. in talking about online play. Well, in a recent interview Miyamoto has said that they are working on one and that,
"It would be a mistake to assume that just because we haven't announced anything, nothing exists, because that's not true. I think, particularly in the U.S., connectivity and online gaming is extremely important"
BTW, that link also lists some other stuff about the Dolphin that you might find interesting.
The article was pretty good for the most part except that I feel the author missed a few points as well.
One of the big factors that killed the N64 was lack of third party developer support, including the defections of some big Nintendo supporters in previous console generations. The reason for that was the fact that the N64 used ROM instead of CD-ROM for their medium to distribute games. The cartridges were more expensive, had less space, and only Nintendo manufactured them.
Yes, you have to go jump through a few Sony hoops to produce a playstation game, but you're free to use your own CD-ROM burning plant you like, and due to the low per-CD cost, manufacturing a set number wasn't a huge expense. Given the freedom of going to whoever they wanted to manufacture them, they could make as many or as few as they wanted.
With Nintendo, you needed to order a minimum quantity of cartridges and those puppies were expensive. As a result it cost more, you took more of a risk, and Nintendo made even more profits than before. Even worse, everyone was learning on the Sega and Sony systems how to get around the limitations of CD-ROM and to take advantage of their strengths. On cartridges, you had a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses and that made cross-system ports bad as well as developers working outside of their area of experience.
Third party support is what made Sony king and what killed Nintendo in the latest rounds. Sony barely has any in-house development but they realized that didn't make much of a difference anymore. The Playstation was simpler to program than the Saturn and I mentioned all the Nintendo problems previously. This round, Sega learned from their mistakes, as has Nintendo. Sega deliberately focused on development tools and Nintendo is going with DVD-ROM so third party supporters won't be stuck in a weird medium.
As for the all-in-one machines, I do believe that we are more ready for it now than back in the days of the 3DO. The failure of the 3DO was the price point as well as some weird licensing issues involved. In the case of the new consoles, the cost is being kept to the same competitive levels as before while the functionality is getting to the point that you're going to have those features anyway. If not this next generation, then the one after that certainly will be.
If you think about the whole thin-client phenomena, then the consoles are well poised to be the home thin client phenomena. I can easily see a home LAN set up with several consoles plugged into a home network and a PC running as the server. A cheaper solution that putting PC's all over the place, and everyone gets the benefits of a centralized network server and probable Internet gateway as well. If you really want to get easy to use, put a Cobalt box in place of the PC with the Web-based administrative interface.
Now all the consoles have all the graphics and sound horsepower you need locally to run the games, the server on the network has all of the functionality that the console lacks and needs, and you have a cheap and easy to configure solution for the consumer market. The only hard part is making the home server easy enough for consumers to use.
In time, we might even see a console that drops the DVD-ROM drive and goes entirely through a network plug for remote storage. Given the cheaper cost of a network cable compared to the hardware needed for a local disc and the way consoles like to shave hardware costs down to the penny, that is only a matter of time as well, I feel. Using a network connection entirely means you can have infinite read/write storage elsewhere on the network. You lose the ability to play CD's and DVD's but you have MP3 and MP2 functionality in the box and you download the audio and video from elsewhere. A true thin client solution.
The only problem there is that it fiddles with the economics of the console industry, which exert control over the production of media and makes the royalty collection part rather difficult. That is going to be the really interesting thing, to see how the PC economic model goes against the console economic model. In short, it's going to be an interesting future.
I've got some points to argue:
1. Nintendo pretty much gets all it's revenue from it's current system in release. If they screw up the dolphin, they're just about done
That is not true. Have you ever heard of Pokemon? Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Red were the top two selling games from January to August 1999. Top two, both made by Nintendo. And Pokemon Yellow was just released, which will sell millions of copies. The Pokemon movies are coming out, I'm sure Nintendo gets a cut on that. Trust me, if the Dolphin failed completely, Nintendo will still be around. And if Nintendo puts a kick ass Pokemon game on the Dolphin (not any of this Pokemon Snap crap), I guarentee that it will not fail. Every single kid in America will want it then. It might not be on top, but I don't see how it could fail. Never underestimate the power of Pokemon.
2. You just can't beat the social interaction in talking about online gaming
That's what we call, multiplayer. Yes, you don't have 32 other people going at the same time with computer Quake, consoles max out at for four usually (with N64 and DC), but it's a lot more social than Quake is. You're in the same room, cussing out the people that are shooting you in Goldeneye, and you can hit them, and see the despier in their eyes when you frag them. I'll take my console multiplayer over PC multiplayer anyday. That isn't to say that online playing isn't important for new systems, it is, but I disagree with your comment on not being able to beat the social interaction on online playing.
But beyond that, the generally accepted reason that the Nintendo 64 failed to grab the PlayStation's market was because it used catridges and not CDs. It's due to the N64's medium for games that it has a limited library (cost more to make, quite simpley). A CD costs about $1 to manufacture, while a cartride costs about $30.
More importantly, CDs offer so much more storage. The biggest catridge game so far has been Zelda: The Ocarina of Time for the N64, and it was only 32 megs (you may have heard 256--that's because Nintendo uses megaBITS, not megaBYTES like the computer industry does). CDs, as anyone here knows, can hold 660 MB, and on top of that, you can use multiple CDs for one game. That can't be done with cartridges.
And the info on the Saturn is a bit misleading. The Saturn was released at least two months before the PlayStation (probably longer), and Sega screwed themselves. They actually did a surprise release of the system. Stupid, since none of their third party developers were ready with any games. The Saturn was also difficult to program for (it used two 32-bit processors).
And the reason Nintendo thought they could pull it off is because they did pull it off with the Super Nintendo vs. Sega's Genesis. The Genesis had an impressive library of games by the time the SNES came onto the scene, but Nintendo ended up winning that race. Of course, the storage mediums were both cartridges, and the SNES was, in most respects, the more powerful machine.
Still, I know more about consoles than I probably should, so I can't fault the guy too much. I'm impressed just to notice that he recognizes that Sony's claim of 75 million polygons a second involves using the processor for nothing but crunching polygons, which will just never happen.
Just an interesting note: Console game developers use this to their advantage. The lower resolution actually provides some free anti-aliasing. Hook some of those polygonal games up to your monitor, and you'd probably notice they're a bit more jaggeded looking.If Microsoft release the X-Box (and I have real doubts they will), it will fail. They seem to be going to console/PC route, and those fail. People want simplicity in consoles; that's their draw. I really don't think console online gaming will pick up much either. I love a good game of Tribes on my computer, but when I sit down to play my PlayStation, I don't feel a need to play in a community.
And on a related note, no game that has enjoyed success on the PC or on a console has done the same on the other platform. The two main problems are the controls (gamepads vs. many keys on a keyboard) and saving points (save-anywhere design of most first person shooters, save after a level design of console platformers, and save in designated areas of console RPGs).
They are cramming in all the features that we in desktop computing has
Console's come in from the hardware side
all in all an entertaining read
Bain
Sanity is a majority vote.
Anyway, the computer game industry has always been a bloody battlefield. Remember the good old days of Atari? Atari tried to copyright and patent the concept of game console, and for a while other platforms had to pay a big amount of money to avoid getting sued to kingdom come. (Sounds familiar?)
There is hardly anything new with the "next generation" platforms coming. People still want pretty graphics, nice games, a few household names. Advance in technology and new features (such as Internet connectivity) will work if they don't obscure the core elements. The technology is progressing, but the fight is the same it was back in the Intellivision/Atari war.
The interesting upstart in this industry is Microsoft. They're basically trying to find the middle ground between gaming platform and personal computer. Too bad it will fail miserably! People either blow $3,000 on a killer machine, or they blow $300 on a gaming console with equivalent graphics. No one will be interested in a compromise that is neither one or the other.
I don't think Microsoft is capable of thinking as an upstart company anymore. It's not like they're stepping into a smaller market and injecting more money than competitors can (think the browser wars.) They're going up against GIANTS such as Nintendo and Sony. These guys have been in the game for a long time.
And so, the Dolphin and the PSX2 will come out, and Microsoft's box will do as well. People will be torn over which platform to buy for a while. Then, one or two platforms will emerge as superior, and the market will move in that direction.
And for once, Microsoft will be a roadkill on the side of the gaming industry history. I'll laugh all the way through WipeOut 3.
Won't that be fun to watch?
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Only two systems? And what is this conventional wisdom? In all of my experience, the gaming industry has been the most unconventional of all "high-tech" industries.
And how can their only be two systems? IMHO, it's either like Highlander(tm) "There can be only one", or there can be a limitless number of systems.
After all, I've seen multiple platforms for new games. You can get the PC version, or the Sega version, and etc. The end customers will simply pick the best system which suits them, based on price, extra functions, and features (probably in that order).
More games means more customers means more games -- a virtuous cycle
This statement is rather ambigious. Does it state that the more customers, the more money, thus more games? Or perhaps, customers are hooked on games, and want to buy the next version (look at Final Fantasy, and many Flight Simulator games).
And you're also finding a trend that sequals are coming out on new gaming systems. Look at Mario, which started on your basic NES, and has evolved to N64, and will probably go on from there.
I guess what it comes down to, is if somebody wants a PC, they're going to buy a PC. And if somebody wants a gaming console, that's what their going to buy. And in each industry, there needs to be sufficient competition to kep quality up, and price down.
"One motivation must surely be to get Windows into the console market, even if that means Microsoft has to go it alone." However, the author of the article neglected to mention that the Sega Dreamcast is based on the Windows CE platform. There are CE logos on the Dreamcast box and the logo appears when you load some Dreamcast software. Many insiders have suspected that Microsoft has used it's partnership with Sega to gain experience in the console industry in preparation for launching its own console. One benefit that the author also ignored is that basing a console on a common (Windows) platform also enables easier ports of computer games. The Dreamcast is already seeing this with ports of Half Life, Baldur's Gate and many other computer games planned. Microsoft may be planning to capitalize on this in order to get the foot hold that it needs in the industry.
A decent article, but I think it was a little rough on the Dreamcast, calling it "inferior" to two machines which aren't even released yet. Yes, I think the PSX2 will be a very impressive machine, and I am curious how the tech of the two will compare, but the DC is here now, and is nothing to sneeze at.
I also reacted dubiously to the author's statement that the only Dreamcast title that had received "glowing reviews" was Power Stone. Power Stone is a good title, but he is ignoring the two star Dreamcast titles - Soul Calibur and NFL2K. I literally have not seen a single magazine give either of these titles less than a 9/10 score, and many people (including myself) have bought a DC almost completely on the merits of these two games.
In any case, I -am- an enthusiastic Dreamcast owner, but am not a biased Sega fanatic - I am genuinely interested to see what the new Sony and Nintendo systems will be able to do. It just seemed to me that the Salon article went a little overboard bashing the Dreamcast, espescially when its competitors won't even exist for several months.
I've been watching this video game thing since
I saw a Pong machine at DFW in 1975.
It's like I was telling my nephew, each generation
of kids will grow up and produce better machines
than they had.
FS1 on a TRS80 with 4k was impressive.
That line froze my blood. Somewhere, in the recesses of my mind, there is a little place that keeps the axioms. In its repotoir are "X is less than X+1", "Your name is Shawn", "Coffee is good" and "Nothing, *nothing*, could make Microsoft compare favorably with Liniux". Right now, I'm having trouble telling what is true.
But I still want a PlayStation 2. Partly due to the dozen or so Playstation games I own.
Shawn Poulsen (Fruan)
"On Slashdot, many obvious things are insightful." - Annonymous Coward, 2000/7/9
Hmmm. One of the reasons usually given for Sony's success in the last round of the console wars is their opening up of the market to a higher age group. Particularly with what the article later goes on to say about convergence, the battlefield this time is surely to be decided by the fickle tastes of twenty-somethings?
That's just plain wrong. Even assuming that the best of the next generation consoles can display 20 million pps sustainably (out of the question for Dreamcast, highly unlikely for PS2 and doubtful for Dolphin) then even at 30fps that's less than a million polygons on screen at a time. Millions of polygons simultaneously will have to wait for the next generation of consoles.
Not particularly exaggerated. Sony make it clear in their press releases exactly what the 75mpps figure is for, and also provides more realistic values.
Sony's Net Yaroze wasn't an attempt to get people playing games online. It was a home development kit for the Playstation. The only 'online' aspect was the fact that you could download software created by other Yaroze owners.
Um. No. There were initial bad reactions to a development system based around Linux ([shudder], command-line debuggers!) but developers who've worked with the kit are almost universally positive. In one notable case (Team Ninja, of Ninja Gaiden and DOA fame) they claimed it was easier to develop for than Dreamcast.
A typical game for any next generation platform is going to cost more. The days of single developers knocking up games in their bedroom after work are gone, you know... From the way the article goes on, you'd think that Sega and Sony hadn't done anything at all to ease development (rather than, say, providing solid support for developers in the form of WinCE and Sony's middleware projects) and that Nintendo had the monopoly on such plans.
No comment. Incidentally, did you notice that Sony's TOOL devkit for the PS2 runs Linux?
All in all, an interesting article. I'm slightly concerned that someone billed as an expert in online gaming thinks that the Yaroze has anything to do with it, though...
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Sure, having the best tech is great, but Playstation kicked N64, because it had the better games.
I dont know if I agree with you on that. I have a lot of hard core gamer friends, and their playstations are all collecting dust as the N64 is getting beat up from overuse. Rgardless though, where N64 has an easy win is in games like Mario and Zelda. These have always been games that sell consoles, they have a reputation for quality and gameplay that will move units no matter how late into the game they come. They also (IMHO) are more engrossing than your run of the mill playstation games. I bought a NES for Super Mario Brothers, I bought a N64 for Ocarina of time. As for the playstation, the only games I saw were shooting, fighting, driving, and killing. They seemed very one dimensional, like alot of PC games. No rewards the second time you play it. Or the third. Dont get me wonrg I like brainless carnage sometimes (mmm Quake), but it wont keep my coming back. With games like Mario and Zelda, there's always a new trick to learn or secret to find.
-Rich
Never be impressed by FMVs. It's just AVI (equivalent) playback; nothing clever at all.
Now, FFVII was good, but its strengths were its size, atmosphere and plot. The graphics were excellent in the sense that the backdrops were well drawn, and the 3D models superimposed on them were expressive, but that's not a technical marvel.
--
Yeah, but only 4 are computer games. Unless you count the thrilling Manhattan Address Locator.
http://www.crossover.com/costik/ has the word on who this crazy Costikyan fellow is. Some of you may remember him as involved with Toon, Paranoia, and Star Wars : The Role-Playing game. Or for "Another Day, Another Dungeon." But probably not for Evolution.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
Are the people at Salon on crack? They say, in relation to the games on the Dreamcast: "So far, only one -- Power Stone -- has gotten glowing reviews." Uh...Soul Calibur has gotten nearly 100% "Best fighting game ever" reviews, and Sonic Adventure is averaging 8-outta-10, so uh....just pointing that out....and stuff
---------
---------
Moo, Baby. Moo.
This article did a semi-decent job of analyzing the current and upcoming console offerings, I'm going to elaborate on a few points, and talk about the long term prospects for console systems, and how microsoft could become a big player.
Quality of Games vs. Hardware power of the system
Never, ever underestimate the power of the quality of available games for how far a system will go. The N64 is clearly superior to the playstation in terms of what it can do. But how many games were available for the nintendo when it came out? Only 2, and it took a long time for the better games the N64 had to come out. The article points this out, saying the intalled base of playstations shut out the N64. I'd take that to be about half the reason the playstation did so well. The other half was the fact that it had so many good games. Specifically, final fantasy 7. Square has to put out games to survive, and since the N64 took so long to come to the market, they had no choice but to develop for the playstation. That was a big loss for nintendo. FF7 by itself moved millions of units of playstations, even when the game came out a few years after the systems' initial release. Hardware is irrelevant compared to the actual game play quality of games. This is the real meat of the gaming industry. The fact that N64 used cartriges was also a big problem, which I'd say is also related to hardware. They understand this now, hopefully. It's too bad they never released that disk drive device (I can't remember its name), because I think it really could have helped them.
Financial resources of the companies involved, and experience in the video game industry.
Nintendo pretty much gets all it's revenue from it's current system in release. If they screw up the dolphin, they're just about done. The same goes for sega. They also have some revenue from arcade games, but that side of the gaming industry is a shadow of what it used to be. I'm not sure if sega does much else in other industries, but if they do it doesn't amount to much. Sony and Microsoft are another story. Microsoft basically has unlimited resources. Sony almost does. I know sony gets a huge amount of it's revenue off the playstation now, but even if they left the video game market all together, they'd still be one f'in huge company. In some ways this might work for nintendo and sega. With their backs against the wall, they might be able to use the pressure to put out really good systems. They both have a lot of experience in the industry as well. Sega already released their system, and they've done a much better job than they did on the saturn, in all respects. I don't think nintendo will make the same mistakes either. Microsoft doesn't know much of anything about console systems, but long term I don't think that matters, as I'll discuss a bit later.
Online gaming.
The article brushes this off, saying it is yet to be proven that consumers want this. This is true for console systems, because it isn't yet available, but will be shortly with the dreamcast. It has been thriving on the PC side however, ever since Quake was released. When I first played quake online, it was the biggest rush I've ever had from a video game. My desire to play 1 or 2 player console games went to 0 in a month. You just can't beat the social interaction, blowing off the head of someone's character who exisits in reality somewhere else, and playing against human intelligence. The future of video games IS TOTALLY IN ONLINE GAMING, in my opinion. Even with RPG's, with ultima online. It's just about as addicting as drugs. Every trend I see points twords this. Whichever company recognizes this first will win. Period.
Convergance of the PC and console systems.
This is where microsoft really comes into play. Console systems and PC's are converging faster than most people seem to realize. PC's have made great strides in graphics with 3d cards, and console systems have had huge increases in raw processing power. In 5 or 10 years, I see most video game systems running on a TV as the current cheap-PC with a high end grapahics card. Another post said micrsoft will flop on this front with the "x-box", any PC based system they come up with will cost too much, over the $200 price point you need to move a lot of units. But really, this limitation and the fact that TV resolutions are low are the only hurdles microsoft has to overcome, and this is only a matter of time. Plus these problems will go away without micrsoft having to put money into it itself. For one, the price points of the current high end and low end PC's have been decreasing steadily for several years, and in 5 to 7 years (maybe less) that low end PC with a good graphicas card will probably BE at that $200 price point. As far as resolution, once HDTV has a good market penetration (80% or so, that might be 10 or more years off, however), the problem is solved. PC systems can take over as the only video game system, sega, nintendo, and sony's proprietary architechure is no longer needed, and in comes microsoft with their proprietary OS, since most PC games are developed for windows. Yikes.
I think microsoft can sense this, hence we start hearing rumors about this "x-box". Good name, since right now it's a mystery and might as well be nothing more than some FUD tactic or marketing BS. But say it comes to market in the next year. It will probably flop, they have no experience in this area, and no one would play PC games on a low res TV anyway. But even if it does flop, it will give microsoft valueable experience in this industry, and once the other problems I mentioned are solved, the door will be wide open for them to come in and take over. DO NOT underestimate microsoft here. This a number of years down the road, but the more I think about this the more I see this scenario occuring.
The reason consoles survive is because they are specialized for a single task. Sony should remember that and learn from the mistakes of others.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Intellivision, Atari and 3DO all tried the tactic of bridging the gap, and all failed because they strayed too far from what consumers look for in a console: ease of setup and good performance of a single task (playing games). If one is going to go through the effort of having a machine that does it all (like a PC), why get a console that doesn't do the job as well?
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I've always felt that because consoles were "just" for games, their proprietary nature didn't matter too much.
However, if new consoles are to be a Trojan Horse, promising (and bringing) games, while secretly introducing home shopping, video-on-demand, person-person comms, etc -- this is the kind of thing I strongly feel should be based on open standards (and of course, the most open standards are those supported by Free Software).
If we're not careful, we're going to start getting email attachments for which you need a PS2 to read (actually, there are already Dreamcast native file formats, e.g. VMU animations...)
Unchecked this could be a big problem.
--