It's fairly apparent that no one has considered that the PC game scene is shriveling up from a financial aspect. Console development makes sense, because you reach a larger userbase, and you get to work with standardized hardware instead of having to worry about all of the compatibility issues with PC hardware. It's no wonder that PC hardware which is more capable than its console counterparts never reaches the same plateaus as far as maxing out hardware.
For example, Playstation hardware which is capable of pushing 360,000 polygons can, with proper programming, push the system very close to its limits. On the PC side, you don't see too many games that are coming close to 15 million polygons on a GeForce 2. You probably won't ever see that happen.
Bungie is taking advantage of an opportunity to jump right into console development as a second party developer. I can understand that some people are a bit bitter that a favored PC developer is essentially giving itself to the console world, but this is really not an issue of Microsoft taking over the game industry. Every console company, Microsoft included, needs second party developers. Rumor has it that Microsoft was looking at every single top-tier developer for a second party relationship (Square-EA, Capcom, Konami) and it seems that Microsoft nabbed Bungie.
For this reason, I imagine Microsoft would not care what home computing platforms Bungie caters to, since the Windows, Mac and Linux markets aren't going to impact sales for consoles greatly (different markets altogether). It is definitely too early for anyone to be complaining about development being stifled for home computing platforms. It's the console war Microsoft is trying to enter here.
If nothing else, Bungie will simply be able to produce a better version of Halo on the Xbox, since they can simply optimize the code to use every ounce of power specifically to the hardware in the system. Anyone that wishes to argue against this can simply wait until Quake III: Arena ships for the Sega Dreamcast, and the explain how a weak console based on the PowerVR chipset will manage to run the game with network support.
I can only wonder if there would be this much complaining if Sony or Nintendo had purchased Bungie instead (they are equally restrictive with second party developers). On the other hand, looks like Halo is just one more game that Sony isn't getting...
I strongly doubt Sony would prepare a contingency product of any kind. The technical specifications, the development tools and the code are all based around the implementation created, and they are probably in no hurry to introduce any potential incompatibilities or other such problems. It is interesting that Sony is not the first console system to utilize Rambus RAM; the Nintendo 64 actually takes that cake. I'm not sure how Nintendo was getting it, but if I'm not mistaken, Toshiba has some vested interest in not only Rambus research but also in Playstation 2 console.
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It's fairly apparent that no one has considered that the PC game scene is shriveling up from a financial aspect. Console development makes sense, because you reach a larger userbase, and you get to work with standardized hardware instead of having to worry about all of the compatibility issues with PC hardware. It's no wonder that PC hardware which is more capable than its console counterparts never reaches the same plateaus as far as maxing out hardware.
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For example, Playstation hardware which is capable of pushing 360,000 polygons can, with proper programming, push the system very close to its limits. On the PC side, you don't see too many games that are coming close to 15 million polygons on a GeForce 2. You probably won't ever see that happen.
Bungie is taking advantage of an opportunity to jump right into console development as a second party developer. I can understand that some people are a bit bitter that a favored PC developer is essentially giving itself to the console world, but this is really not an issue of Microsoft taking over the game industry. Every console company, Microsoft included, needs second party developers. Rumor has it that Microsoft was looking at every single top-tier developer for a second party relationship (Square-EA, Capcom, Konami) and it seems that Microsoft nabbed Bungie.
For this reason, I imagine Microsoft would not care what home computing platforms Bungie caters to, since the Windows, Mac and Linux markets aren't going to impact sales for consoles greatly (different markets altogether). It is definitely too early for anyone to be complaining about development being stifled for home computing platforms. It's the console war Microsoft is trying to enter here.
If nothing else, Bungie will simply be able to produce a better version of Halo on the Xbox, since they can simply optimize the code to use every ounce of power specifically to the hardware in the system. Anyone that wishes to argue against this can simply wait until Quake III: Arena ships for the Sega Dreamcast, and the explain how a weak console based on the PowerVR chipset will manage to run the game with network support.
I can only wonder if there would be this much complaining if Sony or Nintendo had purchased Bungie instead (they are equally restrictive with second party developers). On the other hand, looks like Halo is just one more game that Sony isn't getting
I strongly doubt Sony would prepare a contingency product of any kind. The technical specifications, the development tools and the code are all based around the implementation created, and they are probably in no hurry to introduce any potential incompatibilities or other such problems. It is interesting that Sony is not the first console system to utilize Rambus RAM; the Nintendo 64 actually takes that cake. I'm not sure how Nintendo was getting it, but if I'm not mistaken, Toshiba has some vested interest in not only Rambus research but also in Playstation 2 console.