Sony and Kutaragi - What Went Wrong?

Last week's news that Ken Kutaragi was stepping down from his post at Sony wasn't exactly a surprise, but it does raise a number of questions. Given reports that Kutaragi has visions for PlayStations 4, 5, and 6 and analyst speculation that he'll be involved with those products as well, why is he on the way out the door? 1up's Editor Sam Kennedy spends some time ruminating on the situation on his site blog, and comes to the conclusion that this may be what Kutaragi wanted all along. "No one doubted Kutaragi's vision or ability to create fantastic hardware, but his failure as an executive was holding the division back. This is why Kaz Hirai took his place. With the PS3 off and running at the start of a 10-year life cycle, Sony won't need a visionary for quite some time -- now, it needs someone to run the business. And Kaz is right for that. He's a team player and has great relationships with the publishers. He can take things from here. But in all of this hubbub surrounding his departure, what's perhaps been overlooked is that this may have been what Kutaragi had also wanted. It's unfortunate, as the expectation was always for Kutaragi to climb the corporate ladder, yet this wasn't necessarily his goal. As he once told Newsweek about his executive role, 'We have so many things to create, but unfortunately for me I have a lot of responsibility right now...This was not in my dream.'"

Plus the fact

[rolfwind]

that there was a "standard" gaming platform in the past - it was called the 3D0.

It flopped for many reasons, but I think the primary one was that being a standard, no one hardware company was heavily invested into it, thus having it make or break the bank dependent on success. Usually the one who makes the hardware ensure killer games by making them in-house or licensing them.

Re:Visionary indeed

[trdrstv]

For example, the age old Resistance vs. Gears of War argument from back in the day. Gears of War obviously comes out far far ahead in terms of looks, but this is mainly because UE3 included texture streaming support right away. Insomniac didn't build it in to their first engine on the PS3, and thus it didn't look as good. If you look at Ratchet and Clank PS3 however, it looks gorgeous. Surprise, it has texture streaming support.

It's also the type of game that allows some games to be higher res than others. Even with texture streaming support, I don't feel Resistance could look as good as Gears. In all fairness neither will GTA IV or Halo 3. These games typically require much larger draw distances, and more on screen characters than the 'Stop and pop' of Gears. It forced you into smaller mapps and with fewer enemies so it could load up the eye candy at each turn.

One of my favorite 360 games is Dead Rising, and for the most part it looks like an (original) X-Box game. The characters and models aren't particularly high res (actually the Zombies look lower res than those in RE4 on Gamecube), the difference being there are hundreds of them within your draw distance and (despite some annoying loading between areas) it all runs smoothly. They could have made everything higher res, but not without sacrificing the sheer quantity of them available at one time.

Re:Wow, sometime's 1UP has their heads up their as

[Dutch Gun]

Oh, please. There's hardly anything that's "standard" when it comes to a PC.

I'm not sure what you mean by that - the entire PC architecture is predicated on a very large number of well-established standards, past and present: ISA, PCI, IDE, EIDE, SATA, USB, PS2, VGA, various memory chip standards, etc, etc... All of these standards mean that components can, with some rare exceptions, mix and match freely with nearly any PC device. Pluck a hard drive out of an alienware PC, and it's a good bet it will work just fine in a random Dell or HP computer.

And, although many here are probably loathe to admit it, when it comes to games, Windows-based operating systems are also a very important standard for PCs. The Windows OS, including it's DirectX components (or alternatives such as OpenGL / OpenAL) mean it's relatively simple for a developer to target a pretty wide range of machines, and not have to deal with the intricacies of supporting an astronomical number of possible configurations.

So, yes, nearly every PC is customized in some way, but by no means can you say there's nothing standard about PCs.

Games are just getting too expensive to produce, and it's just not economical to simply release your game exclusively for one platform. Even though it's still early for this generation, we're already seeing a large number of multiplatform games, and, unlike previous generations, the differences in the graphics on the different platforms is almost negligble.

At this rate, if two (or more) different platforms have nearly the same library, why not go the last step and just create a unified console? The developers would probably go for it - less work, more profit.

Games are getting more expensive to produce because of the vast amount of high-definition content required to fill them up. Porting a game engine to a specific platform is a large, one-time cost (plus maintenence, of course). Most of the time, content ports pretty well across similarly-specced systems. I don't think developing for a single platform will save you as much as you might imagine.

Anyhow, while I can't speak for other game developers, I certainly am not in favor of a single "standardized" console. I think this would tend to kill innovation and specialization even more than already is happening. I feel that competition in hardware design standards helps to keep the industry fresh and vital, and the current growth and success of the videogame market seems to support that position.

And, to be quite honest, the direct competition among the console makers is the best thing for developers too. Anytime a particular brand becomes too dominant, they invariably become an absolute pain in the arse to work with. I've seen this with Nintendo when they were domimant with the NES and GameBoy, then with Sony with the PSX and PS2. Oddly, it even works within company divisions the same way. Sony's PSP division is much easier to work with than the PS2 was, and it was far easier to work with Nintendo on a GameCube title than it was with a DS (haven't worked on a Wii product, so I can't say there).

If you think about it, just about every other electronics device we use only has one standard - like DVD. When multiple standards are introduced, it just makes a mess of the market, as illustrated by HD-DVD/Blu-Ray.

Current electronics technology is only standardized as far as supporting common media. You're talking about electronic devices that are simple content players. There's a pretty significant difference between standardizing simple media content delivery for audio and video than for something as complex as a modern computer game.

Anyhow, we can argue about the merits of this all day, but unless market forces push the industry to one platform (don't see it), or unless for some unfathomable reason some the Japansese, US, and EU governments all degree that we must adhere to the "one true game console standard", it's just not going to happen.