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!

Comments

A number of inaccuracies...

[iapetus]

An interesting article, but quite a few of the technical details are more than a little on the inaccurate (or at least arguable) side. Let's take a look at a few of them.

• "But what will determine the outcome of this desperate struggle? Just this: the fickle tastes of teenage boys."
  
  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?
  
  
• "All the new systems boast the ability to display millions of polygons simultaneously."
  
  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.
  
  
• "Sony claims Playstation 2 can process 75 million polygons per second (Sega claims 3 million for Dreamcast). The claim is greatly exaggerated."
  
  Not particularly exaggerated. Sony make it clear in their press releases exactly what the 75mpps figure is for, and also provides more realistic values.
  
  
• "Of course, it remains to be proven that console gamers want to play online at all; previous attempts to get them to do so ([...] and Sony's Net Yaroze) all failed miserably."
  
  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.
  
  
• "Sony actually has a bit of a problem. Its machine is so novel and so powerful that it's quite hard to develop for."
  
  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 Playstation game costs about $2 million to develop. A typical Playstation 2 game is going to cost more"
  
  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.
  
  
• "Sony makes Microsoft look like the free software operating system Linux -- as a result, many developers are unquestionably rooting quietly for X-Box."
  
  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...