Activision Wants Consoles To Be Replaced By PCs 344
thsoundman writes with this excerpt from thegamersblog:
"We live in a world where we have multiple platforms for gaming: PC, PS3, 360, Wii, etc. Each platform has varying amounts of power when it comes to playing games. Activision, one of the leading cross-platform publishers, wishes to move away from the 'walled gardens' set by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. ... [Activision CEO Bobby] Kotick’s solution is to turn to the PC, where it can set its own model for pricing — not unlike what Blizzard has done with World of Warcraft and Battle.net. Kotick stated that Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
Bobby Kotick again (Score:5, Insightful)
While moving away from consoles 'walled gardens' sounds great and the summary makes it sound all nice and everything, this is Bobby Kotick [wikipedia.org] were talking about. The CEO of Activision who's primary goal is to milk as much money from computer games as possible by any means necessary.
In the article he is angry that while people pay for XBL subscriptions, Activision doesn't get any share of that. Basically he wants people to pay Activision a monthly subscription for online services, on top of the normal price for games. While it makes sense for games like MMO's where the developer needs the monthly subscription to keep up their massive server farms and keep creating new content, the usual multiplayer games don't require that. Just see Valve and TF2 or countless amount of other multiplayer games.
Forget about "opening up consoles", making the world a better place, ending wars and famine, he just wants more money.
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, he is surely frustrated that he can't really pursue his own 'walled gardens' on consoles; for that he needs 'open' PC.
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It will probably come and go in waves - forcing customers to upgrade all the time.
Customers are like cows - but milked for money in any conceivable way. Soon there will be copyright infringement suits on dices too.
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Bnet will be his walled garden.
The advantage of PCs running Windows is that it has multiple walled gardens: Battle.net, Steam, etc. You can start your own if you don't like the console maker's, or you can join someone's even if the console maker thinks your business is too small.
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:4, Insightful)
Locked down hardware is the only advantage of consoles.
The primary reason the PC game market is on the long slow decline is "minimum system requirements" and the upgrade treadmill that goes with it. I know that my Xbox 360 will play every Xbox game just as well as yours. I don't have to worry about frame rates or graphic cards. I plug it in, and I know I can play every game designed for the system.
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the usual multiplayer games don't require that. Just see Valve and TF2 or countless amount of other multiplayer games.
Thats simple to get round, you just don't release a dedicated server for your game, and force everyone to use your matchmaking service for P2P play.
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:5, Interesting)
This still affects MW2. Recently they released a second multiplayer level DLC and changed some of the gamemodes (added a "pure" gamemode with no killstreak rewards).
First of all if you want to play the new maps you have to play them in specific gamemode that rotates between team deatchmatch, demolition, sabotage and all the other modes. You cannot select the gamemode you like, but have to play those you hate too. Of course this isn't told on the sales page, but at least this time around I knew it will be the same thing and did not buy the DLC. They will probably be available in a month or two for the other gamemodes, but the funny thing is that those who don't have the DLC cannot join the games that have the DLC. This devalues the game for the old players, as they have much less people to play with and possibly can't even find a game to join.
Secondly, they removed Capture The Flag gamemode to make room for the "pure" gamemode. It was my favorite one with Sabotage, but now I cannot select it. Obviously this would had not been a problem with dedicated servers where the server admin could choose it freely.
Then theres also the cheaters.
It just sickens me how they ruined otherwise good multiplayer game in their pursue for more cash.
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First of all if you want to play the new maps you have to play them in specific gamemode that rotates between team deatchmatch, demolition, sabotage and all the other modes.
This is either intentionally misleading or you are misinformed. As long as everyone in your party has the new maps they will show up in all the game modes (at least all the standards like TDM, domination, ground war, CTF, ect). What they did was ADD a NEW game mode that allowed you to play ONLY the new maps and that game mode rotated between the various game types.
This devalues the game for the old players, as they have much less people to play with and possibly can't even find a game to join.
This is just absurd. you clearly have no concept of the size of the player base. Most of my friends got the DLC but a few don't and we convince
More Anti-Corporate Propaganda from Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Forget about "opening up consoles", making the world a better place, ending wars and famine, he just wants more money.
You sound very cynical. I think Bobby Kotick has learned that being evil is bad and he wants to redeem himself by making the gaming experience easier for children. He's merely thinking of the children when he wants to make games like Armed and Dangerous easier to experience with a PC environment.
P.S.
I am NOT Bobby Kotick. I'm just an AC who is giving an objective, unbiased opinion.
Modern Paintfare (Score:2)
He's merely thinking of the children when he wants to make games like Armed and Dangerous easier to experience with a PC environment.
Here's an idea: Make the retail game or the basic download stuck in paintball mode so it can get that E10+ or T rating. Then put a coupon in the box for DLC with the blood in it, which (unlike stuff hidden on the disc) is rated separately.
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:5, Insightful)
The CEO of Activision who's primary goal is to milk as much money from computer games as possible by any means necessary.
In this case, the point is moot. Anyone who supports an open standard platform for gaming gets my vote, greedy or not. Walled gardens, especially when they are the dominant garden in the park, are never good for consumer choice or price in the long run. Sure Kotick can charge more on the PC than on some propriety gaming platform where he must follow orders. But he also can't exclude competition or dictate any terms to anyone else... so go to it Activision, I really hope you succeed in making a plugin and play gaming PC platform based on open standards!
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:5, Insightful)
One should also remember that consoles hold back the development of games. Even something like XBox 360 has only 512 megs of memory, which severely limits how complex gameworlds it can represent; just compare with the 2 gigabytes minimum on newer PCs, and 6-8 gigs or more on high-end machines.
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Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit. PC games provide ways to reduce the load for older PCs. I could play COD4 in my P4 with a two year old $75 graphics card. Now that I have a quadcore and a HD5770 (total PC price: $450) I play it with much higher resolution, particles, etc.
People are not forced to upgrade significantly more regularly than with consoles. They simply have the option to do so, and enjoy better graphics if they choose to.
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:4, Interesting)
Call of Duty 4 in a ATI x600: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld60-3LHOMI [youtube.com]
50 fps. Perfectly playable.
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Consoles and PCs have long ago reached the point where they can create a large, detailed, world. Yet, if you look at an RPG on the PS3 compared to one on the SNES, you'll find it's often smaller and shorter. Yes, the salt-shakers on the table in the
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I said older, not laptops made with low power consumption and cheapness as goals. That's like expecting MGS4 to run on a PSP.
Games other than Crysis for netbooks? (Score:3, Interesting)
I said older, not laptops made with low power consumption and cheapness as goals. That's like expecting MGS4 to run on a PSP.
The PSP has games developed specifically for the PSP. So why don't I hear more about games developed specifically for netbooks?
Re:Games other than Crysis for netbooks? (Score:5, Interesting)
because they are based on Adobe Flash! That's why people are so vocal about iPhone not having Flash because it's the leading platform for "low spec" PC games... sure the graphics are simple, but it's the same game everywhere. There are far more people playing Scrabble, Farmville, or Bejewled for 15-30 minutes at a time than playing the "AAA" console games.
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Nobody in their right mind views a netbook as a gaming machine.
Yet people in their right mind have seen advertising that portrays DS, PSP, and iPod Touch as gaming machines.
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Bullshit.
Having a restrictive (yet capable) standard sandbox enables a developer to focus on working within those constraints, which can allow them to exercise creative freedom. Look at some of the most interesting and innovative games recently --
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:5, Insightful)
It's bad news all-round. If every publisher started up it's own variant of XBox Live, you'd have to pay subscription fees for every publisher, maybe for every game. You'd be working yourself into serious debts if you want to sustain (multiplayer) access to a variety of games from different publishers.
Re:Bobby Kotick again (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair this whole subscription service mania is a result of revenues not growing as much as costs so sooner or later their whole operation will crash down anyway (they'll focus on delivering fewer and fewer titles that must all be huge hitters but epect failures to eliminate publishers going that route) and people who are less hostile towards the customer and blowing less money on nonsense like cutting edge graphics (of course you need decent graphics but you don't need expensive cutting edge ones) will take over. While Activision et al build bigger and bigger blockbusters countless avenues for cheaply made games are springing up everywhere. The future of gaming is not ridiculous prices, it's cutting back the superfluous costs and delivering reasonably priced games with good enough graphics and good fun (which isn't terribly expensive).
Price competition (Score:3, Informative)
If every publisher started up it's own variant of XBox Live, you'd have to pay subscription fees for every publisher, maybe for every game.
You already see this with MMORPGs. But publishers will try to keep prices low even if only to attract price-conscious customers. Look at Activision with every Blizzard-brand game other than World of Warcraft: anyone with a valid serial has at least 5 years of free online play.
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I'm not sure I'd bet 100$ on that. They're already putting the non-terran campaigns as expansions in SC2, I'm fully waiting for other weird moves of the sort.
Sort of (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, sort of. Actually, not really. Someone who explicitly just wants to replace Sony's walled garden with his own, doesn't exactly strike me as a sort of freedom fighters. In fact the whole situation kinda gives me the mental image of fighting Apple's walled garden by replacing it with Microsoft software.
The fact that the PC hardware itself will be open is effectively just a way to pass that unprofitable part to someone else. PC's commoditization just drove the profit margins of PC vendors into the basement and allowed MS to stick to the part where it can rake in the taxes like a king. In the end it's one reason why MS did better than apple, back in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Activision here wants the same thing. It wants the likes of Dell and HP to do the work of building a cheap PC that's kinda like a console, but not charge royalties for it, so he can get the money instead.
And generally I would question the logic between giving your vote to someone just because they intend to replace another asshole. The history is full of examples where that was a bad idea. I could even Goodwin it by mentioning a certain election in '32 where some people thought they'll show the established parties and coalitions by voting for the new and vocal third party, so to speak. Yeah, that went so well. But otherwise from Lenin to Yuan Shikai to ancient greek tyrants (yeah, most of those used populism to subvert the self-serving oligarchy that passed for ancient greek democracy), we have some millennia of people who offered to save us from they tyranny of someone else by replacing it with their own.
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Someone who explicitly just wants to replace Sony's walled garden with his own, doesn't exactly strike me as a sort of freedom fighters.
I don't know. Plenty of freedom fighters throughout history overthrew a brutal dictatorship just to institute their own. (Most didn't have the decency to tell you this up front, however.)
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Pretty much my point actually. I'm pretty much disinclined to believe any claim to be a freedom fighter if it involves his own benevolent autocracy (or even oligarchy) at the end, and much less so from someone who is candidly honest up front about being just pissed off that he's not the king collecting taxes off the land. I mean, I appreciate the honesty, but you won't find me with a torch and pitchfork in his mob at the castle gates.
Already Done (Score:5, Funny)
Kotick stated that Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
Perhaps they could call it an X-Box.
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Sounds to me that they would do better by talking to video card manufactures; if everything was based on a video card, it wouldn't really matter what sort of PC you had; add TV out hardware (if you can find a video card without the hardware already there) and use the GPU for the games.
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And way before that, my Geforce 4 MX came with S-Video out. TV out became common at least eight years ago.
SDTVs don't take HDMI (Score:4, Informative)
Modern video cards already have TV out hardware; DVI -> HDMI adapters come in the box of nearly ever video card I've seen in the past 2 years.
The impression that I get from reading comments to other PC vs. console articles is that gamers tend to play games on secondary TVs, not the main living room TV, because someone's watching a show like American Idol on the main living room TV when they want to play. These secondary TVs are often $10 thrift store CRT SDTVs that don't take HDMI. However, they do take VGA through a $40 adapter cable [sewelldirect.com] that produces composite video and S-Video.
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"No sane console gamers would buy an A/V card every year,"
Shit, in the cases of some portables, it doesn't even take NEXT YEAR for the new model to come out and fanbois panties get wet.
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No sane console gamers would buy an A/V card every year
That depends. Does it take four PCs and four A/V cards to run a 4-player game? Or can they hook up gamepads and a TV [youtube.com]?
attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC (Score:4, Insightful)
Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
So would I .... it would like a great MythTV box
It's easy to say "Yea, what Blizzard did!" (Score:5, Interesting)
There are no shortage of companies that want to tinker and salivate over how Blizzard's business model works. It's a game, direct to consumer, that has a monthly recurring fee with a very nice retention rate. So far, everyone has been absolutely god awful at pulling this off. The desiccated and dismantled battlefield of competitors goes to show, Blizzard has magic that isn't easy to reproduce
I think the closest analog that Activision could come to is Steam. Yet again, deeply entrenched business model, direct to consumer with a nice retention rate.
What Activision wants is control over the entire food chain. They are neither ready, nor well developed enough to jump from a business model they know incredibly well, to what is working on a, very profitable basis, but across a very, very narrow list of businesses that pull it off.
The best thing Activision could do right now is ditch the idea of a PC under the tv. People for generations of games have made a very clear delineation for where they want their pc's and where they want on their consoles. And any company such as a Dell or an HP would be complete morons to go after that failed market again, and again.
What Activision needs to do, is sit down with whoever they have doing arcade games. Take that, pop out a Steam like client, and make it a)not a crippled, bloated piece of shit b) not DRM'd to the point where you're screwing with your call center numbers by increasing traffic off a small step into the market and finally c)make it compelling.
God the number of amazing indie developers out there that would kill to have Activision's resources behind their projects, without Activision being a general corporate pain in the ass... Go for the small market see what you can do there, it's your test pool. If you can't work out strategy there, then you're not going to do it where the big fish play. Remember, small nimble teams with experience.
Then again, since when has Activision listened to anyone screaming "NO THAT'S A HORRIBLE IDEA, WOULD YOU PLEASE NOT DO THAT" and then watched whatever they've tried doing bomb, and tumble into disaster.
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Pretty much, short of one screen co-op games (Nintendo's forte), the difference between a console game and a pc game is that that pc games tend to default to mouse and keyboard input, while consoles choose a joystick.
That and consoles have cryptographic lockout and policies against small, home-based businesses. Say my small company has made a working PC game that could be the next great one-screen 4-player party game, yet it isn't an "established" enough company to seek a license from Sony or Nintendo. (We considered XNA, but RROD and no procedural audio killed that.) Now where do we publish it, or how do we get it ported to a platform on which we can publish it?
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2Dboys did manage to get World of Goo on wiiware, but it was well after the game sold like hotcakes with free ponies on PC/Mac/Linux.
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They wouldn't follow friendly advice that's gamer or dev friendly anyway, with what they keep doing to gaming studios it's obvious that Kotick keeps a fake moustache in his desk so he can twirl it.
Gaming beyond the MS/Sony (Score:2)
Glad someone is thinking about new games on this generations gpu's with all the new features.
Get the income stream. back to the producers not to some middle empire feeding of users and creators.
Don't cripple your PC games, then, Activision! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ex. Modern Warfare 2:
"Criticism has arisen of changes made to the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 including the lack of dedicated servers, latency issues of the listen server-only IWNET, lack of console commands, lack of support for matches larger than 18 players, and inability to vote towards kicking or banning cheating players immediately"
Remove the benefits of PC gaming, and gamers won't game on a PC..
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inability to vote towards kicking or banning cheating players immediately"
This part is especially annoying. Thanks to Killcam, you can see how the other person killed you. Often it is blatantly obvious that someone is cheating. Yet nothing can be done (not even if you are the one hosting the game, i.e. you are the server). Thats another thing. It never asks you "do you want to host the game". It simply finds the best upload/lowest latency connection and hosts the game there.
Also, without hosting your own servers you cant make your own rules. That means if all you wanna do is
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Mac Mini? (Score:2)
I mean isn't that basically what he's describing here?
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Wait, Activision? (Score:2, Informative)
Wait, Activision? They're still in business? I would have thought Robert Kotick would have ran them into the ground by now. God, he's getting slow in his old age.
What's that? He's trying to turn Battle.Net into "Facebook for Gamers?" He's going to require everyone playing WoW to use their real names on the official forums (and in the in game friends' list), so that the next time you piss off some mentally unhinged social reject you can figure that out by the knife embedded in your front door and the cr
Pros and Cons (Score:2)
This would be great, IF this gaming PC could play titles from various platforms. OTOH it would require some degree of technical know-how to maintain such a PC, I mean look at how we currently tweak to get a game running on occasions. And what about infections?
A Linux based box, for stability and security, that runs a sandbox for Win games, perhaps with something like www.reactos.org, with direct hardware acceleration to avoid such bottlenecks.
Hardware is cheap nowadays so multi-processors and a few GiB's of
WTF is this? (Score:2)
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A build your own console thing wouldn't be a horrible idea in a perfect world. You could have a big list of 'approved' parts and just switch them out as usual. Some games would require 'advanced' parts, some would require 'basic' parts. You could maybe construct it for $100 on the cheap end, and $1000 on the expensive end. You could replace parts as often as you wanted to play new games. It could have a Steam-like system for downloading games and connecting with your friends.
This is just like the idea
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I'm surprised you have to pay for the WoW client; Eve does fine without making you pay for the client or any patches / expansions. Still, if it ain't bust...
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All he really wants is for the major PC manufacturers to put together a HTPC with a gaming sticker on it, ideally the manufacturers and the gaming industry would would agree on standard specs and Activision would be able to say "All our games run on Dell HTPC Gamerz Edition".
There would obviously not be any difference between the Gamerz Edition and anything you could build yourself with parts from Newegg, the point would just be to aggressively market the idea that you can play TV-games with a PC. The main
In order to avoid Microsoft and Apple ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hell they could release something like SteamOS (name just for explanation) where it installs like Wubi and can be updated/patched from Windows but to play you have to boot into their OS.
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They'd be creating a support nightmare for themselves, unless they did something like put a bit of code on there forcing the disk to only boot on "approved" systems, because hardware support for bleeding-edge hardware (particularly graphics cards) can be a bit patchy at the best of times.
There's a special word for a box with a limited range of hardware that runs games directly from a read-only media such as CD or DVD. Now, what was that word again?
green eyed monster (Score:4, Insightful)
Electronic Arts thinks the same way, it seems (Score:3, Informative)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7052420.stm [bbc.co.uk]
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It's called an abstraction layer, and nothing's stopping the games developers from funding a cross-platform layer which does that. The difficulty is in adding a layer of abstraction, making that layer reasonably platform-independent and still seeing half-decent performance.
You're forgetting something Bob (Score:2)
To beat money out of a PC franchise, it needs to be good. Ask EPIC about how well games that compete with Halo compete with Valve.
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an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up dire (Score:2)
an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
Sounds just like the ZX Spectrum I had in the 80s.
Done already, but not in the way he wants (Score:2)
A quiet PC with HDMI for output, usb gamepads for input, and a ton of emulators is already the perfect console; simple & reliable, yet flexible and upgradable, no rats nest of cables, no CDs to get damaged (no moving parts at all, if you can afford the latest stuff). Add XBMC and you have all the living room technology you need in a single box :)
On a tangent, I ponder the possibility of having a standard virtual machine designed for games -- having a ton of emulators to convert from consoles to the PC
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The problem isn't getting the hardware, but getting the combination of software and hardware. If you go the TV PC way you will quickly find out that most software doesn't actually work with a gamepad or only works after quite a while of configuration with joy2key and friends. Searching for patches and entering cd-keys is also not fun when you are holding a gamepad. And keyboard/mouse is just unpractical on a couch. To make the PC on your TV work for the masses you would need it to be cheap, silent, standard
Plug and play PC that hooks directly to a TV? (Score:2)
Didn't the XBox do exactly that?
Okay, it was a rather underpowered PC, but still...
iPhone (Score:2)
Talking about walled gardens, perhaps we can also replace the iPhone and iPad by PCs?
One nets more fish using more streams (Score:2)
After reading TFA I feel I need to poke one's eyes out...
One does realize, doesn't one, that Activision is interested in units sold, regardless of one's platform? The more platforms one can compile one's game engine and downsize their artwork for, the more likelyhood one has of selling a game to another one.
PS: Where did one learn to write?
Linux for Gaming rigs (Score:2)
I just wish there was something similar to Mythbuntu for gaming PCs.
I want to be able to install it on a home brew computer or net top, plug in my usb game pad, and navigate to a simplified package manager (that just shows the games section...there would also be an update manager and package manager with a full list of packages if you switch to desktop mode) where I can install some of the many awesome OSS games / Emulators / etc available and just play them.
There are a lot of USB Gaming devices (thank you
Amstrad Mega-PC (Score:2)
Not exactly the same thing (as others have pointed out, XBox = PC with a TV-out - it just gets abused whoever makes it into a vendor-locked system) but anyone remember the Amstrad Mega-PC? Huge ordinary PC (of the 386-era, I think) with a little slidy door that revealed a Megadrive slot and turned the computer into a Megadrive (Don't think it was emulation, just a switch to an internal Megadrive board).
I would have killed to have the money for one of those at one time.
Just the opposite (Score:2)
Funny, I was just thinking the other day (while de-malware-izing my sister's computer for the fifth or sixth time...2000+ trojans, backdoors, and security-disabling programs; a task that left the computer itself barely able to run) "I wish that for this sort of person, there was the computer-equivalent of an xbox: a decent PC with good video and O/S hard-coded in, untouchable without the addition of something physical or at least without the use of a dongle, perhaps with a hard drive for storage of document
dead end (Score:4, Insightful)
what a piece of nonsense.
We don't need a new computer type. We need a little bit of innovation regarding connections.
If you have a computer in your computer room, and a flatscreen TV in your living room, why can the computer not use the TV as an output device? Wire, wireless, don't care. Why invent a new device if it does nothing you don't already have?
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Technically, yes, a gaming console is a Personal Computer, though not a fully functional one, since you are very limited to what software you can use on it. Also, even Apple, which makes Personal Computers but with different OS, wants to make a distinction between Windows PCs and their "Macs", though technically a Windows PC and a Mac are both Personal Computers.
Anyway, current consoles are limited to what games they support and who is allowed to make games for them. Anyone can make and sell a program (game
Re:Console vs PC Gaming Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Download patches as required
I never had to do that on my NES, SNES, Atari, Wii, Sega, gameboy, etc...
Downloadable patches is the current evil for console games, it ruins the "plugin and play" spirit. If you cannot supply patches you will make damn sure your game works. Yes, most oldies have a few bugs, but nothing that make the game unplayable, more glitches that require special actions. (super mario 1 - level -1, zelda links awakening - screen teleport glitch, pokemon - "missin no")
These days we have games that simply are unplayable unless you patch them, which is crazy.
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But those games where very simple when compared to today's games. Today's games are 10000 times bigger.
Re:Console vs PC Gaming Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Today's games are 10000 times bigger.
Today's games are only 10,000 times bigger because of the higher-fidelity audio and higher-resolution graphics. The games themselves are not 10,000 times more complex, otherwise they'd be unplayable by humans, so they have no excuse to be any more unstable than their older counterparts.
Sorry, I agree with the GP... patchable console games make for shittier games because publishers are more inclined to say "she'll be right, we can patch it after release."
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I disagree on that, games themselves now ARE probably 10000x more complex.
Think of Mario:
One object which has to do some collision detection, movement and input, and some other things (koopa's) that just move about on one axis.
Think of GTA4:
A whole city where parts of it have hundreds of physics-enabled objects, some of which can be interacted with, destroyable cars, pedestrians, rubbish, along with complex missions (well, sorta), collision detection for both movement as well as shooting, and so on.
New game
Re:Console vs PC Gaming Experience (Score:5, Informative)
- a quaternion based animation blending and transitioning engine (and more importantly the tools to author the animation networks)
- Inverse Kinematics, aim/orient/point constraints
- 1000's of animation takes (our last title used approx 3000 animations per character)
- A rigid body representation for the physics engine, including joint limit set ups etc.
- A way to blend and transition back and forth between animation and physics (simple ragdolls aren't good enough anymore)
- The geometry & textures need to be authored by an artist(s)
- Vertex & Pixel Shader to render the character.
- Particle systems to generate smoke near the characters feet.
- A lodding system where number of bones in a character, geometry detail, etc can by changed dynamically.
- This data needs to hook into the collision, AI, and networking systems.
All of that has to run on the PS3, which means you need to use the SPE's (and the code most be heavily vectorised to make use of the altivec instruction set). This means all of that body of work has to be split up into lots of 256Kb chunks (for both code and data) so that you can schedule them to run on the SPEs. Finally you get to the really easy bit, rendering the data. That volume of work would take a team of 10 programmers about 3 or 4 years to complete.
Now lets compare that to how you'd do that for a 2D NES/SNES/Gameboy game:
- get an artist to draw some sprites.
- blit correct sprite to screen.
That should take an experienced programmer no less than half a day to write that. Art assets are certainly increasing in complexity, but the code complexity has exploded to another level completely.
because publishers are more inclined to say "she'll be right, we can patch it after release."
All games have to go through extensive QA testing, both in house, at the publishers, and at microsoft/sony/nintendo before the game gets gold status ready for release. This process alone can take anywhere from 6 months to 3 years. Unfortunately despite game teams best efforts, we can't catch all of the bugs, so patching a game after release has become a necessity.... I can assure all game teams want to get all bugs before a game is released. If you don't, you get bad reviews, and your sales suffer....
Re:Console vs PC Gaming Experience (Score:4, Informative)
I can see you are a game programmer then.
Now lets compare that to how you'd do that for a 2D NES/SNES/Gameboy game:
- get an artist to draw some sprites.
- blit correct sprite to screen.
This might interest you then. I suggest you do some research on those platforms. The 'GPU' these consoles used are far from what you see these days. There is no blitting, you setup a bunch of memory and registers during VBlank and the GPU does the wonder of rendering for you, the whole screen. You don't say "sprite N at X,Y" every frame, no you setup the sprite once and then it keeps getting drawn there. Which is the easy part.
All special effects come from tricks, poking the right registers while the screen is being drawn, but in some cases this is only allowed during HBlank.
Also, don't forget that you only have an assembler, no high level languages. And limited amounts of debugging.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You've missed a large part of the OPs point! You say that QA testing spends much effort finding bugs and glitches but we both know that doesn't mean that the managers in charge are going to FIX them before the game ships!
If they don't fix an issue before the game ships then here comes....THE PATCHES!
Blergh.
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Todays games are larger, yes. But today we have different tooling.
Yes, it's not that hard to build a platform game like super mario 1. Unless you only have an assembler, 40K of ROM, 2K of RAM, a CPU at slightly less then 2Mhz and a GPU with some strict timing requirements.
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Downloadable patches is the current evil for console games
The problem isn't even the patching itself, but the way patches are implemented. On the PS3 you can't download them in the background, you have to let your console sit there for half an hour while its downloading that 500MB patch, in which you can't do anything else. If I could download the patches in the background while I would make my way through the tutorial they would bother me a lot less. And of course it would be nice if the console would download patches once they get available, not when I insert th
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And yet, ironically, you proved the GP's point: The unpatchable NES version worked correctly, the patchable PC version did not.
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Hmmm....how about a car analogy?
You: I just want to get from A to B quickly and easily. That's why I take a cab: that way I don't have to worry about fuel, looking after the vehicle, road tax etc etc.
Me: I want to get from A to B on my own terms and in style. That's why I've got my own custom-built, tuned and tweaked muscle car. I can see the appeal of just getting a cab but i don't mind getting my hands dirty - the results are worth it for me and I'm good enough at tweaking the thing that I can keep it run
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...I can keep it running smoothly without having to pull over and stop every time I fill up the tank...
That's quite a feat! Are you siphoning fuel out of gas tankers on the move? :P
Re:Console vs PC Gaming Experience (Score:5, Insightful)
1. try to make out text that isnt aliased/sampled properly.
2. play for 5 minutes.
3. Level transition time, loading.
4. play.
5. load.
6. play.
7. load.
8. change disk.
9. load.
10. RROD.
11. vendor retroactively takes features.
12. game vendor nickels and dimes you for DLC.
13. after 13 DLC's at $5 each you finally have a full game.
PC
1. Set resolution to monitors native (most games do this automatically now).
2. Play.
3. Keep playing.
4. Holy crap, there's more then 4 hours of content in the game and no loading screen.
5. Enjoy quicksaving.
6. Get free content from the distributor (thanks valve and stardock).
7. Play the game 15 years later on your modern gaming PC.
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Console.
1. Open tray
2. Close tray
3 Play
continue till bored.
PC
0. Make sure computer can actually run game, if not go out and buy more parts till it can.
1 Open tray
2. Close tray
3. Install
4. Crash
5. Hunt for drivers.
6. Crash
7. Spend hours tinkering with options and settings to get a decent framerate and accecptable graphics
8. Crash
9. Spend hours trawling forums trying to pinpoint exact problem
10. Recify problems, change registry settings, reinstall game, reinstall drivers
11. Try Again
12. Crash
13. Repeat unti
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Modders aren't cheats, unless you're one of those butthurt console gamers who think improving gameplay, fixing bugs and expanding the game is cheating.
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People have to check to see if they meet requirements? I haven't done that since.....'98 when I started building my own computers. I've never had the $5,000 top of the line gaming systems - they're reasonably priced ($500-$700) and they're good enough to run any game on the market for at least four years. Drop down another $100 on a new video card and it's good to go for at least another two years.
The only reason why it's an "issue" is that too many companies push crap video cards in their systems just t
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The salesmen do push gaming machines. It goes like this: "Well that 2GHz processor with 256M of RAM and a 32M intel card isn't going to play any games at all, it just won't handle them. But if you get the 3GHz processor with 256M of RAM and a 32M intel card and this nice new monitor and an extra external hard drive and this 'gaming mouse' then it'll play all the latest titles for years to come!"
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Use a different OS installation; Dual-boot FTW. With GRUB, you can even hide the main OS partition before booting to the gaming OS.
(not that I do it - I just have my /home partition encrypted anyway).
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You forget
"PC:
Get bored or annoyed at something in the game
Look online
Get mods
Suddenly have even more playtime out of the game
"
All you get on consoles are the DLC the studios give out when they're willing to throw a bone at you.
Oh, and if the game is buggy (e.g. Oblivion) forget about unofficial patches on console.
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Dont expect Apple to ever offer you opengl or Windows to ever be stable...
Actually OS X supports OpenGL just fine or were you thinking of a specific version or feature which isn't supported to your liking?
As for Windows, it can be quite stable, not exactly on-par with clustered OpenVMS setups and the like but stable enough that you shouldn't have any problems (my current work laptop which is the only windows machine I use on a daily basis has so far only crashed three times and all those times were when restoring from hibernation, haven't had this problem since I updated all driv
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