Will Consoles Merge Back Into PCs?

GamePolitics is running an interview with Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, discussing the future of gaming on the PC and the console. Stude has some interesting thoughts regarding the long-term viability of stand-alone consoles: "The guts of every console should tell you that the capability is there for the PC to act as the central point for all the consoles. If you bought a PC and as part of that equation you said, Okay, when you're on the phone with Dell, 'Hey, Dell, on this PC, this new notebook I'm buying, can you make sure it has the PlayStation 4 option built into it?' Well, why not? Why shouldn't that be the case? [Sony is] certainly not making any money on the hardware. I mean, can't they create a stable enough environment to specify that if Dell's going to sell that notebook and say that it's PlayStation 4 [compatible] that it must have certain ingredients and it must meet certain criteria? Absolutely they could [do] that. Are they going to do it? I don't know. I predict that they will. I predict that all of the console makers over time will recognize that it's too expensive to develop the proprietary solution and recognize the value of collapsing back on the PC as a ubiquitous platform."

Re:Indie games don't run on console!

[CronoCloud]

If a hobbyist can't break out gcc and make his own game for a console, is the latter really up to me?

[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Yellow Dog Linux release 6.0 (Pyxis)
[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported
clock : 3192.000000MHz
revision : 5.1 (pvr 0070 0501)
 
processor : 1
cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported
clock : 3192.000000MHz
revision : 5.1 (pvr 0070 0501)
 
timebase : 79800000
platform : PS3
 
[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.1.1 20070105 (Red Hat 4.1.1-52.ydl.1)
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
 
[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ apropos pygame
pygame (rpm) - Python modules for writing games
pygame-devel (rpm) - Files needed for developing programs which use pygame
 
[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ apropos sdl
SDL (rpm) - A cross-platform multimedia library.
SDL-debuginfo (rpm) - Debug information for package SDL
SDL-devel (rpm) - Files needed to develop Simple DirectMedia Layer applications.

True, you're not going to develop a 3d hardware accelerated game directly on the PS3 (for now). But you can do 2D games or make a prototype to show a publisher or SCEA.