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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!
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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