Console Manufacturers Want the Impossible? 316
Phopojijo writes "Consoles have not really been able to profitably scale over the last decade or so. Capital is sacrificed to gain control over their marketshare and, even with the excessive lifespan of this recent generation, cannot generate enough revenue with that control to be worth it. Have we surpassed the point where closed platforms can be profitable and will we need to settle on an industry body, such as W3C or Khronos, to fix a standard for companies to manage slices of and compete within?"
About to change (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably not a coincidence that the PS4 and Xbox One are both running x86 chips inside them. Aside from a few choice bits, developing on each machine should be incredibly similar to the point where it's just a different API for either.
The best part is that this should translate equally well to the PC industry. If Valve does the SteamBox right, we might just have that "standard" the article is clamouring for. If Valve mandates that a certain level of Steambox has at least an 8-core x86 CPU with a GPU of equivalent power and 8GB of RAM (or better yet, convinces AMD to release an SoC similar to what's inside the PS4), we'll have 3 very different platforms that are easy to develop for, even easier to port to and a golden age of gaming where your platform of choice won't massively impact the games you can play.
Closed ecosystems are thriving (Score:2, Interesting)
The only story here is that Apple's closed i-device ecosytem is outcompeting Sony's Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox closed ecosystems.
The death of closed platforms is a nice fantasy, but it won't happen as long as typical consumers continue to be lazy asshats who would rather buy an app from an app-store than write one themselves.
Re:About to change (Score:5, Interesting)
That is true, but there's always been more to it with consoles. While people don't necessarily drop down to assembler as much these days, it's still worth getting to grips with each console's underlying design in order to get the most from it. Take the PS3, its well known that it has CELL chips but writing code for it can't really be left up to the compiler to sort out, you have to know when to use the CELL over the PPC chip, you have to know the best way to package that data and send it, when it's optimal to do so versus when it's going to hinder performance. It has two different types of RAM and it's worth knowing which is best to use and when.
Even the Xbox 360, although much "simpler" to develop for, has a few exotic bits you don't find on the PC - like the ED-RAM on the GPU that can boost performance considerably as long as you know how to use it effectively. I believe both the PS4 and the Xbox One have a few subtle differences that'll be worth paying attention to, but they're a lot closer to the design of a regular PC than previous consoles (with the possible exception of the Xbox).
Re: Consoles aren't profitable? (Score:5, Interesting)
The truth is that Microsoft forced $6 billion into the system to try to takeover... When there was NEVER $6 billion in profit to make back without knocking Sony or Nontendo out and gaining back control.
Basically nobody LOST which means in a good capitalist system there isn't that much profit to go around... Even though Microsoft was trying hard make it a non-free market which is where they were pulling all their numbers for investors from.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Quite a bold statement that the console market isn't profitable, where is your source for this? MSFT posted Q1 2013 earning for the Entertainment and Devices Division:
"generated revenues of $2.53 billion for the quarter, up 53 percent from the same period a year ago. The division includes the Xbox business and Microsoft said there is now 46 million people signed up to use its Xbox Live online service, up 18 percent from the same period a year ago."
Seems pretty damn lucrative to me...
That assumes that MSFT have not costs.
It took MSFT 3 years for the Xbox360 to stop being a loss leader (each console sold for less than what it cost MSFT to make it), it took Sony 5 years for the PS3 to stop being a loss leader. Neither have paid back the initial R&D costs.
Sure Sony and Microsoft have lots of nice shiny revenue, but anyone in business will say "Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity". The PS3 and Xbox360 have been huge money sinks for MS and Sony.
But I feel we're forgetting someone.... Someone who made a lot of money...
Oh hai NINTENDO.
Nintendo made a metric buttload of cash, paid off their R&D very quickly and never sold the Wii as a loss leader. More than that, the Wii was hugely successful. Released last and outsold Microsoft and Sony's combined console sales for 3 years. Why, because they didn't pretend the console was a PC. They made a console that for the first time since the Super Nintendo was actually fun to play. That's how you make money in the console world. Sony and Microsoft need to learn it's not about how powerful your console is, it's about how fun and accessible it is. It seems the PS4 and Xbox One have given this generation to Nintendo by default (as the Wii-U is a mediocre console).
To say that "consoles" are unprofitable is really to say "Microsoft and Sony consoles" are unprofitable. Nintendo consoles were very profitable.
Re:Consoles aren't profitable? (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, the software development industry has moved on significantly since the early 1990's:
These are all things that make development much cheaper and more stable.
True, but the bar has also been raised greatly.
I mean, all of those things mean that I can single handedly, and quite easily write a game that vastly outperforms Doom I in terms of graphics, etc (ignore artwork...) single handed. It's obviously not because I'm a better programmer than John Carmack, or even that great, it's because I can just do it with much more powerful tools.
The thing is that expectations moved on. If anything the top end games are vastly more expensive to develop than they ever were because the expectations have moved faster than the technology. If nothing else, now vast teams of artists are required.
Re:A solution for the wrong problem (Score:5, Interesting)
The same thing happened to special effects on TV shows and in movies
True. Visual effects have become good, but not cheap. We no longer have movies with a "cast of thousands", we have animation staffs of thousands. Look at the credits.
About a decade ago, I was talking to a Hollywood director about this. He'd done some films that had live and animated characters interacting. The cost of doing that was high. He was hoping that, in a few years, he'd be able to make $100 million movies for $20 million. It's not working out that way.
There was hope for that in games. Procedural generation was going to make it possible to have huge cities without huge teams of artists building them. Didn't work out. SpeedTree can generate huge forests and outdoor scenes cheaply and well, so you can have a huge, mostly empty natural world like Red Dead Redemption. Cities, not so much. There was much interest in procedural city generation around 2009, but what comes out is usually only good enough to fly over.