If you pay attention hes really skewing the numbers in favor of his argument. When you compare something like Call of Duty to Angry Birds sales numbers and don't even mention the cost difference it becomes blatantly obvious your lecture is probably filled with other half-truths.
So long as people have big TVs and consoles are the simplest way to play games on them, they will remain popular in one form or another.
Nothing stops you from hooking up your iPad to your TV though. The new ones definitely support that resolution. Add a bluetooth controller to it, and you're all set. If playing it on a big TV is really all you're after.
Nothing stops you from hooking up your iPad to your TV though. The new ones definitely support that resolution. Add a bluetooth controller to it, and you're all set. If playing it on a big TV is really all you're after.
It's all about the games though.
You can't sell even a $30 game on the ipad or iphone, yet selling a $50 or $60 happens every time on both consoles and portable consoles.
As a result you will never get the same experience, or the same length of an experience, and people don't want the same experiences.
Two different markets, Ben Cousins is as objective as you can ever get, and he's said this before, he fails to realize that both markets will co-exist just as the hand-held consoles did with the consoles.
certainly an interesting presentation, and worth the 26 minutes (if he doesn't put you to sleep) but I can't help feeling he's a little off.
while all his history examples are accurate enough they are also cases where the technology has been replaced with essentially a more convenient version of the same thing; right up to last years hardware sales where you don't need a separate camcorder, gps, and whatnot because a smartphone has all those built in.
His argument/explanation for the arcades was largely that the experience became recreatable at home when the xbox/ps could match the arcade machine 1:1. Now largely I'll agree with that as 98 is about when I stopped going to the arcades and stayed home to play ps1 ganmes with my friends where we could also drink and smoke and pause the damn thing without some little 12 year old coming over and fucking-up your street fighter match by humiliating you in fromt of those same friends.
Not to mention that console games became so much bigger as far as, they stopped being about getting players to pump in as many quarters (actually dollars at the point) as you could and became about these huge worlds with engaging stories/characters that you could spend ages in. Lets face it, you'd never get Final Fantasy or GTA3 in an arcade and that's the difference. It's the experience, not the hardware that matters.
It's the same thing with console vs mobile. The mobile experience will never be the same as the console experience.
Angry Birds vs Call of Duty.
This is not a legitimate comparison when the cost difference and install bases are so grossly disproportionate. But for the sake of argument: Call of Duty Black ops is not the biggest seller, Modern Warfare 3 is and it's sales alone are over 1 billion. Even if EVERY one of those 500 million downloads of Angry Birds was a sale (not even half) that would still only be 500 million.
as far as cinema being dead, errrr, the US box office revenue for 2011 was approximatley 10 billion dollars alone. The average film does 3x as much worldwide as it does domestically. While exact numbers are pretty hard to pin down, if we round off that's still 30 billion dollars. I'm sorry but if 30 billion dollars is dead than necrophillia must be pretty damned popular.
While I'd ultimately agree that console gaming as it currently works is going to change, it won't be anym ore dead than pc gaming is...
1. Current game engines in order to stay competitive are becoming compatible with damn near all devices. Unreal and unity are both running in flash. It may take years to reach the graphical fidelity we have today, but its becoming easier and easier to port your game to almost anything you want.
2. Digital distribution is being taken up by all the major players, nintendo's jumped on board, we have origin, new purely digital and wireless methods of delivering games are popping up all the time.
3. Devices across the board are fast approaching console power, soon to be current gen, and within the next gen's lifetime, they will be on par with them as well.
4. Wireless technologies will allow any of these devices to connect to any screen in your house using any controller of your choice as has been discussed already.
When you take these facts all together, the only thing you need to provide to reach the gaming public is a universal platform that can determine what your current device can handle hardware wise, and with your current input device. Heck you could even sell hardware easily to the consumer to enable them to play more games though your digital distribution service. It's almost as if things are reversing, before you would buy the hardware and then decide what software you want to play, now you get your hands on the digital distribution platform of your choice and decide what hardware you want. We're fast approaching an age where if you try to limit your software with hardware requirements you're going to be left behind. Hence, the death of the console.
His two key comparisons are the death of arcade devices and the death of movie theaters.
If you look at these two things they have something in common, they offered pretty similar experiences: In both cases you had to drive to a seperate place and it was a pay-per-play sales model. The whole spectacle was inconvenient and expensive. With the advent of consoles you could play whenever you wanted and you only had to buy the games once and you could play for as long as you wanted. It was convenient and more cost effective.
The console vs. mobile device transition is not the same thing, the same sales models will work on both devices (Purchases, F2P models, ad support, etc.) and you arguably don't get much gain in convenience because even if you could play the same games, the games for consoles are designed to be played for hours on end which is not something most people, especially adult gamers, want to do when they're out of the house so even if they could they'd probably play them at home anyway.
The only real significant benefit here is that a mobile phone is a device everyone already has where as consoles are something you have to buy seperately but even at that Sony/MS are both seemingly trying to turn them into media center devices (although admittedly they're doing a horrific job of it) to sort of expand the value of the devices.
The other issue is that just because graphics power has increased significantly on mobile devices doesn't mean it's any more practical to develop a visually intense game for a mobile device vs. a console. The example he illustrated his point with was Infinity Blade by an Epic subsidary which has a vested interest in advertising its engine as delivering top tier visuals for mobile devices. Seriously how many other games look as good as Infinity Blade? Unless AAA developers can financially justify sinking production budgets into making mobile games, no one is going to be making games with AAA visuals and thus the market will remain segregated unless *developers* decide to make the leap.
Also his figures on Microsoft and Sony's financial losses are blatantly misleading, they've been intentionally eating losses in order to gain market share at the cost of having to sell their hardware for less than it cost to make. The conclusion he seems to be drawing from these losses is that this is evidence that the market is in decline, but infact that's the total opposite of reality.
Its all Conjecture. Nobody predicted Pokemon, Angry Birds, or Minecraft coming and nobody thought Mario would still be knocking around 30years after his conception.
None of you have psychic abilities just admit we all just don't fucking know.
Uncertaintainty of the market now is another major reason for the predicted death of consoles. They are massive investments that skirt a profit on predicting trends and knowing they have an iron fist on the market. They also need to have years of uncontested dominance to reach this profit. But this is all rapidly changing.
And del all those games you cited as unpredictable are small indie type projects that could directly be released on a non-console device. You could battle someone with your pokemon on your iphone against someone on their PC or ipad thousands of miles away.
If at the very least we don't know what's going to happen in the future, that is a huge detriment to the consoles.
now you get your hands on the digital distribution platform of your choice and decide what hardware you want. We're fast approaching an age where if you try to limit your software with hardware requirements you're going to be left behind. Hence, the death of the console.
That's not very scientific though, digital distribution has been around on pc for many years now, and pc ONLY games have been thriving wherever they pop up, nor has angry bird in any way been hindered from not being on any of the consoles or millions of DS's out there.
Doesn't matter what apple, microsoft or sony does, zelda and mario exclusivity will ensure a fantastic amount of sales of nintendo consoles, and that is not changing.
Same thing with the microsoft and sony and their respective exclusive titles.
The way apple dominated the short-experience casual market has made it impossible for any kind of big budget experience to even survive on there, every developer that wants a piece of that market has had to adjust the games they develop due to that very fact, it doesn't matter if you can connect it to your tv or connect a controller to it, there's still not any of those kind of games on there, and there's no way to be profitable with those games on there.
Hence, consoles have been around for ages, and while they've morphed around, and while digital distribution is getting big, they still remain, same with pc's.
This has been talked about to death here on Polycount. As far as I see it, consoles aren't necessarily "dying" as they are evolving. The goal seems to be having -one- box for all your needs. Television, movies, music and yes - games. Then there's a whole bunch of shit in between.
Ben Cousins is trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Is anyone really surprised that a mobile developer CEO is predicting the "death of consoles"?
Nothing says we won't be making games on tablets. Though we'll probably be hooking them up to more capable displays and keyboards when we're at work.
Look at iPad VS. macbook air purchases, there are even less people buying iMacs or macbook pros. Win8 is clearly aimed at touch displays. How many consumers are going to be buying real PCs over the coming years vs. a android tablet or iPad or some as of yet unseen windows tablet when all they want is to consume content online or play games? Development goes to where the money is.
All our content creation apps will be ported over one way or another. I think there will always be power use cases, but how long will hardware manufacturers want to support a shrinking market?
EDIT:
Yeah we all know all the AAA games of today and tomorrow will require high spec PCs, but after that when mobile tech catches up? Then there won't be a need for a "powerful PC" to play the latest games.
I find looking at this stuff the way he looks at it is rather pointless. Nothing dies. Technology evolves. People learn from what they created previously. Maybe consoles will 'die'. Consoles as we know them now. World changes. Today you can play good games not even paying a dime for them (Team Fortress 2, Blacklight Retribution etc). Things will change many many times in the future. No need, at least for me to draw a point on the timeline after which consoles are dead. I think its way more interesting from 'technology evolution' than 'they can't make as much money as they did' point of view.
Nothing says we won't be making games on tablets. Though we'll probably be hooking them up to more capable displays and keyboards when we're at work.
So we make a tablet, put some pc hardware in it along with an unlimited operating system such as linux or windows, attach a keyboard and a monitor and then sit at a table.
But this is not a pc?
The thing is, pc's will become more and more portable, and tons of people already do their work on laptops quite often, but these are nothing but pc's, ios has a locked system.
Look at iPad VS. macbook air purchases, there are even less people buying iMacs or macbook pros. Win8 is clearly aimed at touch displays. How many consumers are going to be buying real PCs over the coming years vs. a android tablet or iPad or some as of yet unseen windows tablet when all they want is to consume content online or play games? Development goes to where the money is.
All our content creation apps will be ported over one way or another. I think there will always be power use cases, but how long will hardware manufacturers want to support a shrinking market?
You're comparing apples massive market to its smaller market, if you look at the amount of pc's in the world you'll see that they quickly overshadow iphones or ipads.
The one thing ipads and iphones will take over is the web-surfing pc.
The very definition of a personal computer is the wide area of usage for it, the pc is too heavily integrated into our society to ever go away, servers, workstations, and the one free platform with interchangeable parts.
EDIT:
Yeah we all know all the AAA games of today and tomorrow will require high spec PCs, but after that when mobile tech catches up? Then there won't be a need for a "powerful PC" to play the latest games.
Mobile tech can never catch up to stationary tech, it's all about size and power requirements, this is why servers end up taking up entire rooms and quite a heavy chunk of power.
Todays tablets or smart phones are astronomically more powerful than the expensive workstations of the 90's, yet we're still not making games on those, why is that?
You make a lot of good points, but I still think we're going to see a massive decline in traditional desktop PCs and laptops as consumer products. They'll stay around as servers and power computing devices for sure.
I think any business that doesn't require heavy computing power will likely switch over to tablets simply because they cost less.
It seems as though everyone is pushing for locked in software and at least apple's case for locked in hardware too.
Though back to the main topic of the thread, I doubt consoles will "die" just evolve. There will be a market for people that want a dedicated gaming device.
The global melt down was slow to hit entertainment and entertainment lags behind all other growth. It's no surprise that the raise in cheap and free games coincides with this down turn.
It makes sense, dollar stores and bargain bins take off when the economy turns for the worse. But as things start to improve people get tired of cheap and crappy and start to crave quality. I think it would be a mistake to champion the dollar store as the new main stay that will sustain everyone in the future as things improve.
It doesn't help that when people where faced with a new tech gadget to buy there wasn't a new console competing for attention and its not surprising that people dropped a lot of coin on a phone that does a lot of stuff and goes anywhere but not on something that isn't even competing.
It doesn't help that as we got to the end of the current hardware life cycle the band-aid they slapped on the consoles (PSMove and Kinnect) didn't really manage to capture the imagination of customers like a new console would.
I personally think the next evolution will be things like Steam's box that can run a few different services including Steam. People want high quality streaming content as things keep improving and people realize that tiny screens and even pads just don't have the processing power or battery power to give them everything they want on the quality and scale they will want.
He also compares Infinity blade to Modern Warefare3. Infinity blade will no doubt kill battery life and not run on all the hardware supported under iOS. Also Modern Warfare3 wasn't all that stunning or an accurate representation of what modern games can do, they had to hit a few different levels of hardware so you shoot for the lowest common denominator.
Compare Infinity Blade to the Samaritan demo and discuss what you can and can't do. Right now mobile looks like its catching up to consoles but consoles are well past their logical lifespan. Congrats mobile you caught up to 7 year old console tech.... which is notable but will it catch up on pace when customers finally get around to getting a hardware upgrade?
I seriously doubt there will be one winner and one new gold standard for gaming, but I do think developers will need to think cross platform and incorporate mobile more and more, hopefully as an additional dimension to the game if not just another platform to enjoy similar content. If anything this will force a focus on IP and making a brand as strong as possible and as enjoyable as possible on a wider range of devices, if a company makes good use of everything.
I for one welcome the "death" of consoles, if it means we will become a niche market again, since that is a market you can better serve as a developer, which should mean better quality products for the consumers.
look at the "death" of point and click adventure games. its market never shrunk or died out, it simply became forgotten. those fans where waiting to be served new adventure games while the publishers and developers saw new money in other markets so they left that market behind. It never died out, those gamers who wanted more adventure games didn't suddenly drop dead when those big studios stopped making adventure titles. The success of the double fine kickstarter proved that that market is still there.
You make a lot of good points, but I still think we're going to see a massive decline in traditional desktop PCs and laptops as consumer products. They'll stay around as servers and power computing devices for sure.
I think any business that doesn't require heavy computing power will likely switch over to tablets simply because they cost less.
So you are really saying that a stationary pc costs more than a tablet of equal hardware?
I bet the porn industry is already on mobile... though I still have no iOS or Android device so I can't say for sure
Nah, the best we get is a couple of slideshows of some...thing, or pixel games with 'hidden' behind the curtains with shadows orgy.
I mean it's not as cool as the console and PC market, when you can shove a giant purple guitar with a Jar-Jar Bink's mushroom tip at the end, in your friends 'arse and play "Stairway to Heaven" while wearing a force-feedback code piece and having a bunch of anime school girls shout your name.
So you are really saying that a stationary pc costs more than a tablet of equal hardware?
No that's not what I'm saying at all. What I mean is that more and more people doing say web surfing, office work, or even programming or similar tasks, who don't need all that computing power will instead go with more portable and cheaper solutions even though they are less powerful.
Who really needs all that power aside from gamers, CG professionals, server side applications, and scientific computing (which is often distributed)? Gamers will go for consoles and maybe the rumored Steam Box. The rest are a niche market when compared to all other consumers.
I'll admit these are all Apple centric which is still niche and doesn't represent the computing market as a whole, but with Microsoft, Apple, and Google all pushing tablets, who's pushing desktops? Games? People always say "I like that game I wish it was on Steam." well soon we'll have Steam Box for that.
I'm not really trying to win an argument with you here It's all just my opinion based on what I've been reading lately, and my own personal preferences/bias.
Microsoft is a little more subtle about it by forcing DirectX in as many places as possible, which makes cross platform development much more difficult than it should be. More of an economic lock than an actual one.
Certainly Apple is by far the worst offender in this area.
When you say that "soon we will have the Steam Box for that" you do realize that the Steam Console rumor sort of got shot down a week ago or so, right?
Don't have much more to add to this. But whether consoles have a healthy long life ahead of them or not it's nothing really to be worried about. If tablet truly do become strong enough we could easily just use console controllers and plug the tablet into the tv in order to get the same experience for the most part.
Likewise for a PC game experience if computer games switched to tablets there would be keyboard and mouse addions I think.
Though overall I'd say that route would be quite a bit more expensive, lots of tablets are already way too expensive, and the iPad doesn't have an SD card slot or anything does it? I personally like how I can use my desktop and add a ton of large hard drives if I want to and never worry about running out of space.
Smartphones and tablets are going to kill handheld gaming devices. If Sony & Nintendo don't have plans on turning the PSP & Gameboy into smartphones they will be going the way of PDA's and MP3 players.
When you say that "soon we will have the Steam Box for that" you do realize that the Steam Console rumor sort of got shot down a week ago or so, right?
Oh! I didn't know that, wasn't paying attention to it really :poly136: I guess it'll just be Xboxes and Playstations in the future then.
No that's not what I'm saying at all. What I mean is that more and more people doing say web surfing, office work, or even programming or similar tasks, who don't need all that computing power will instead go with more portable and cheaper solutions even though they are less powerful.
Who really needs all that power aside from gamers, CG professionals, server side applications, and scientific computing (which is often distributed)? Gamers will go for consoles and maybe the rumored Steam Box. The rest are a niche market when compared to all other consumers.
Now you're saying it again, cheaper portable solutions! That's a reversed fact, I would this very instant go and purchase a tablet pc if it was cheaper than my stationary and just plug it in, everyone would, but that will never happen, it defies all logic!
Steam box would be made to bring more console gamers to the pc, read below.
I'll admit these are all Apple centric which is still niche and doesn't represent the computing market as a whole, but with Microsoft, Apple, and Google all pushing tablets, who's pushing desktops? Games? People always say "I like that game I wish it was on Steam." well soon we'll have Steam Box for that.
I'm not really trying to win an argument with you here It's all just my opinion based on what I've been reading lately, and my own personal preferences/bias.
It doesn't work like that, if you start stating crazy opinions you'll end up in an argument sooner or later.
No one and everyone is pushing pc hardware, the fact that the pc is an open standard in terms of how things go together means that there's no one company that owns pc's, everyone can build them, even regular consumers. Even the macs are custom-built pc's by apple running apple software.
The day indie developers and steam goes away will probably mark the death of the pc as a consumer platform, but now instead we're seeing more and more games, mmo's, EA opening up origin, the very flexibility of the pc platform is why it is in every possible sector of usage, it's a general purpose machine!
Apple, sony or microsoft will never let in valve on their platforms, that's a pretty given fact, so the rumour is that valve would make their own console, in reality this would most likely be a handbuilt pc, that runs ALL the pc games on steam.
It would be built to bring more console players towards pc, not the other way around.
Valves thrives on the pc for the very fact that it is fully free platform, and the games they sell on there also thrive because of that very fact, tons of indie games that don't have to pay licensing costs to use windows or the pc.
Apple has however been the underdog when it comes to personal computing, but they're dominating the portable phones and tablets market, which is I guess why they're thinking of their alternatives, but I don't think they'll drop the idea of their computer, THEY however might transform it, as the mac is not as crucial as an open platform to many people as the pc is, not that it wont be met without resistance.
Microsoft is a little more subtle about it by forcing DirectX in as many places as possible, which makes cross platform development much more difficult than it should be. More of an economic lock than an actual one.
Windows is by far the most widespread OS among pc's, that's why developers use directx which is also a pretty solid library on its own.
But no one is forced to use it, there is plenty of stuff out there that uses other libraries, or they can use opensource wrappers that compile to use whatever library is the most common one for the platform, such as SDL.
The important thing to note here is, you don't have to use directx, there's no cost to using directx, there's no cost to selling anything for windows, there's no limitations on what you can use on your windows machine, and you don't even have to use windows.
And the fact is, directx is only used on windows and the 360, it's not used on the iphone, the androids, macs, sony or nintendo platforms. Yet everyone manages to release games on both ps3 and 360.
I think I may have a miscommunicated the term "tablet" what I mean by tablets are ipads and android tablets, not pen enabled tablet PCs (is that what you are talking about? are those still being made?).
From the Applestore cheapest macbook air is starting at $999 the new ipad $499, Googles upcoming Nexus tablet is rumored to be ~$199, that's really cheap better than most netbook prices, which a quick look at google shopping says are ~$250 - $500?.
Also I'm not saying that tablets are a desktop replacement right now, but in the future as time goes on. Obviously right now the applications needed by everyone for everything don't yet exist in tablet OS form, but I think they will sooner or later.
PC development is open and hopefully will continue to be so, but the overall thing I'm trying to get at is that I think the desktop and laptop PCs of today will evolve into something more like tablets in form factor and function if not outright become them in the future. You mention the economy of scale which is completely true, smaller tech costs more, but tech prices are always dropping as well. Won't we eventually hit a point where everyday computing needs are met with acceptably affordable, and powerful enough mobile hardware (like tablets)?
By the economic cost of cross platform development with DirectX, I mean choosing to develop using both DirectX and OpenGL, it's not free to do so. You either pay for a engine which does both (yeah Unity and UDK are free upfront but eventually you have to pay something if you're successful enough) or you write your own engine to support both which takes more time then just having to use one or the other.
I thought I read that Metro isn't going to support OpenGL at all either (or was it just the ARM version of Win8?).
EDIT:
Full disclosure: My only real beef with DirectX is that it's the reason WebGL isn't supported in Internet Explorer which irritates me very much :poly127:
I think I may have a miscommunicated the term "tablet" what I mean by tablets are ipads and android tablets, not pen enabled tablet PCs (is that what you are talking about? are those still being made?).
From the Applestore cheapest macbook air is starting at $999 the new ipad $499, Googles upcoming Nexus tablet is rumored to be ~$199, that's really cheap better than most netbook prices, which a quick look at google shopping says are ~$250 - $500?.
Also I'm not saying that tablets are a desktop replacement right now, but in the future as time goes on. Obviously right now the applications needed by everyone for everything don't yet exist in tablet OS form, but I think they will sooner or later.
Don't just compare prices, compare hardware.
Certain things definitely became replaced by tablets, like browsing the internet, checking your mail, doing things like that, they're perfect for it, it's because the tech got to the level where it became very usable for those things, and it doesn't require an open platform to check your mail.
But if you look at the new ipad you'll be able to find a stationary at a much smaller pricepoint with the same specs, that's how it'll always be.
We'll have fantastic $500 tablets in the future doing things that a new computer does today, but then we'll also have even more powerful stationary computers at the same price.
The very concept of a PC will stick around even if it moves toward being more portable when better battery-tech arrives, we're just too used to the freedom, and so are developers.
Stationary computers will pretty much be dominant until the day when we have unlimited battery-tech and can be very wasteful with our portable tech and not have to build them around using only a fraction of the power of a stationary.
PC development is open and hopefully will continue to be so, but the overall thing I'm trying to get at is that I think the desktop and laptop PCs of today will evolve into something more like tablets in form factor and function if not outright become them in the future. You mention the economy of scale which is completely true, smaller tech costs more, but tech prices are always dropping as well. Won't we eventually hit a point where everyday computing needs are met with acceptably affordable, and powerful enough mobile hardware (like tablets)?
Lets use this example: you'll never be older than someone who is older than you, no matter how old you get.
Tech is the same, we'll get fantastic portable tech and our phones are pretty much capable of things I couldn't imagine when I was younger, yet it's all derived from the tech that arrived 5 years before on the more power-hungry stationary tech.
It's chunkier, larger, but more powerful, there will always be more powerful tech in our stationary tech, there's really no ceiling to hit anytime soon, and it's always going to be cheaper than the newer lightweight less powerhungry portable itterations of the tech.
By the economic cost of cross platform development with DirectX, I mean choosing to develop using both DirectX and OpenGL, it's not free to do so. You either pay for a engine which does both (yeah Unity and UDK are free upfront but eventually you have to pay something if you're successful enough) or you write your own engine to support both which takes more time then just having to use one or the other.
I'm currently coding my own "tech" for a game, it's running with sdl *and* opengl, which means I'm using both directx and opengl, it's only cost me my time which compared to other things has not been that much.
Every single tool I've used has been completely free, and I'm free to sell this without any platform limitations, and porting it should be easy too.
I guess you're right about stationary hardware always being at least a few steps ahead of smaller portable tech if not more. Added to that, even though newer tech will be absurdly powerful compared to today's tech I'm sure developers be pushing the limits of acceptable performance so that mobile will always be at a premium price point or simply under powered for whatever the standard computing needs of that time are.
I didn't know that SDL was a DirectX and OpenGL API... hmm...
why is everyone going on about the battery and lack of power of portable compared to a full desktop computer.
i own a laptop and a have had a ipad before, but when i want to do serious work, even if it is just writing up a paper or something like that, i use my desktop, and the reason isn't because of power. The reason is that it has 2 22inch monitors, a full keyboard and mouse, sits at a table with lots of desk-space for papers, and has really good speakers attached with my "ENTIRE" music collection.
it's the same deal when it comes to games, yes i could play on a portable system but i get a much better experience from my desktop, due to lots of screenspace to play on and my choice of a full keys and mouse, or gamepads.
i really only use my portable systems for communication, and while on trips, and even on trips i sometimes wont take any tech with me.
I guess you're right about stationary hardware always being at least a few steps ahead of smaller portable tech if not more. Added to that, even though newer tech will be absurdly powerful compared to today's tech I'm sure developers be pushing the limits of acceptable performance so that mobile will always be at a premium price point or simply under powered for whatever the standard computing needs of that time are.
We'll always find more use for power, or if you wish I can quote that infamous half-fake bill gates quote on memory
We'll always want more power and we can't even imagine the days when we were just fine with the fraction of power we currently have.
I didn't know that SDL was a DirectX and OpenGL API... hmm...
<--- considers C++ for like the millionth time...
SDL is layered on top of whatever it is compiled for, if you compile the code in windows it'll use directx, if in osx or linux it'll use the equalents over there.
But the big thing is that you don't have to rewrite your code, it should stay pretty much the same.
why is everyone going on about the battery and lack of power of portable compared to a full desktop computer.
Everyone knows that better batterytech is something that could really help with all kind of modern portable tech, we rely quite a bunch on the powergrid, and all portable tech is built around using as little as possible and have as many power save modes as possible, and even then we don't get enough time out of stuff.
If we suddenly had a breakthrough in batterytech we'd see some very interesting things happening to portable tech.
SDL is layered on top of whatever it is compiled for, if you compile the code in windows it'll use directx, if in osx or linux it'll use the equalents over there.
But the big thing is that you don't have to rewrite your code, it should stay pretty much the same.
Good to know, thanks! I think I'll try to get at SDL through haXe rather than the usual route of C++ though.
Replies
So long as people have big TVs and consoles are the simplest way to play games on them, they will remain popular in one form or another.
It's all about the games though.
You can't sell even a $30 game on the ipad or iphone, yet selling a $50 or $60 happens every time on both consoles and portable consoles.
As a result you will never get the same experience, or the same length of an experience, and people don't want the same experiences.
Two different markets, Ben Cousins is as objective as you can ever get, and he's said this before, he fails to realize that both markets will co-exist just as the hand-held consoles did with the consoles.
while all his history examples are accurate enough they are also cases where the technology has been replaced with essentially a more convenient version of the same thing; right up to last years hardware sales where you don't need a separate camcorder, gps, and whatnot because a smartphone has all those built in.
His argument/explanation for the arcades was largely that the experience became recreatable at home when the xbox/ps could match the arcade machine 1:1. Now largely I'll agree with that as 98 is about when I stopped going to the arcades and stayed home to play ps1 ganmes with my friends where we could also drink and smoke and pause the damn thing without some little 12 year old coming over and fucking-up your street fighter match by humiliating you in fromt of those same friends.
Not to mention that console games became so much bigger as far as, they stopped being about getting players to pump in as many quarters (actually dollars at the point) as you could and became about these huge worlds with engaging stories/characters that you could spend ages in. Lets face it, you'd never get Final Fantasy or GTA3 in an arcade and that's the difference. It's the experience, not the hardware that matters.
It's the same thing with console vs mobile. The mobile experience will never be the same as the console experience.
Angry Birds vs Call of Duty.
This is not a legitimate comparison when the cost difference and install bases are so grossly disproportionate. But for the sake of argument: Call of Duty Black ops is not the biggest seller, Modern Warfare 3 is and it's sales alone are over 1 billion. Even if EVERY one of those 500 million downloads of Angry Birds was a sale (not even half) that would still only be 500 million.
as far as cinema being dead, errrr, the US box office revenue for 2011 was approximatley 10 billion dollars alone. The average film does 3x as much worldwide as it does domestically. While exact numbers are pretty hard to pin down, if we round off that's still 30 billion dollars. I'm sorry but if 30 billion dollars is dead than necrophillia must be pretty damned popular.
While I'd ultimately agree that console gaming as it currently works is going to change, it won't be anym ore dead than pc gaming is...
1. Current game engines in order to stay competitive are becoming compatible with damn near all devices. Unreal and unity are both running in flash. It may take years to reach the graphical fidelity we have today, but its becoming easier and easier to port your game to almost anything you want.
2. Digital distribution is being taken up by all the major players, nintendo's jumped on board, we have origin, new purely digital and wireless methods of delivering games are popping up all the time.
3. Devices across the board are fast approaching console power, soon to be current gen, and within the next gen's lifetime, they will be on par with them as well.
4. Wireless technologies will allow any of these devices to connect to any screen in your house using any controller of your choice as has been discussed already.
When you take these facts all together, the only thing you need to provide to reach the gaming public is a universal platform that can determine what your current device can handle hardware wise, and with your current input device. Heck you could even sell hardware easily to the consumer to enable them to play more games though your digital distribution service. It's almost as if things are reversing, before you would buy the hardware and then decide what software you want to play, now you get your hands on the digital distribution platform of your choice and decide what hardware you want. We're fast approaching an age where if you try to limit your software with hardware requirements you're going to be left behind. Hence, the death of the console.
If you look at these two things they have something in common, they offered pretty similar experiences: In both cases you had to drive to a seperate place and it was a pay-per-play sales model. The whole spectacle was inconvenient and expensive. With the advent of consoles you could play whenever you wanted and you only had to buy the games once and you could play for as long as you wanted. It was convenient and more cost effective.
The console vs. mobile device transition is not the same thing, the same sales models will work on both devices (Purchases, F2P models, ad support, etc.) and you arguably don't get much gain in convenience because even if you could play the same games, the games for consoles are designed to be played for hours on end which is not something most people, especially adult gamers, want to do when they're out of the house so even if they could they'd probably play them at home anyway.
The only real significant benefit here is that a mobile phone is a device everyone already has where as consoles are something you have to buy seperately but even at that Sony/MS are both seemingly trying to turn them into media center devices (although admittedly they're doing a horrific job of it) to sort of expand the value of the devices.
The other issue is that just because graphics power has increased significantly on mobile devices doesn't mean it's any more practical to develop a visually intense game for a mobile device vs. a console. The example he illustrated his point with was Infinity Blade by an Epic subsidary which has a vested interest in advertising its engine as delivering top tier visuals for mobile devices. Seriously how many other games look as good as Infinity Blade? Unless AAA developers can financially justify sinking production budgets into making mobile games, no one is going to be making games with AAA visuals and thus the market will remain segregated unless *developers* decide to make the leap.
Also his figures on Microsoft and Sony's financial losses are blatantly misleading, they've been intentionally eating losses in order to gain market share at the cost of having to sell their hardware for less than it cost to make. The conclusion he seems to be drawing from these losses is that this is evidence that the market is in decline, but infact that's the total opposite of reality.
Nobody can predict the gamer market.
Its all Conjecture. Nobody predicted Pokemon, Angry Birds, or Minecraft coming and nobody thought Mario would still be knocking around 30years after his conception.
None of you have psychic abilities just admit we all just don't fucking know.
And del all those games you cited as unpredictable are small indie type projects that could directly be released on a non-console device. You could battle someone with your pokemon on your iphone against someone on their PC or ipad thousands of miles away.
If at the very least we don't know what's going to happen in the future, that is a huge detriment to the consoles.
That's not very scientific though, digital distribution has been around on pc for many years now, and pc ONLY games have been thriving wherever they pop up, nor has angry bird in any way been hindered from not being on any of the consoles or millions of DS's out there.
Doesn't matter what apple, microsoft or sony does, zelda and mario exclusivity will ensure a fantastic amount of sales of nintendo consoles, and that is not changing.
Same thing with the microsoft and sony and their respective exclusive titles.
The way apple dominated the short-experience casual market has made it impossible for any kind of big budget experience to even survive on there, every developer that wants a piece of that market has had to adjust the games they develop due to that very fact, it doesn't matter if you can connect it to your tv or connect a controller to it, there's still not any of those kind of games on there, and there's no way to be profitable with those games on there.
Hence, consoles have been around for ages, and while they've morphed around, and while digital distribution is getting big, they still remain, same with pc's.
If anything I see desktop PC and Mac dying out in the next decade or less to become mobile tablets running Win8+, iOS, and Android.
...What do we make games on again?
Look at iPad VS. macbook air purchases, there are even less people buying iMacs or macbook pros. Win8 is clearly aimed at touch displays. How many consumers are going to be buying real PCs over the coming years vs. a android tablet or iPad or some as of yet unseen windows tablet when all they want is to consume content online or play games? Development goes to where the money is.
All our content creation apps will be ported over one way or another. I think there will always be power use cases, but how long will hardware manufacturers want to support a shrinking market?
EDIT:
Yeah we all know all the AAA games of today and tomorrow will require high spec PCs, but after that when mobile tech catches up? Then there won't be a need for a "powerful PC" to play the latest games.
So we make a tablet, put some pc hardware in it along with an unlimited operating system such as linux or windows, attach a keyboard and a monitor and then sit at a table.
But this is not a pc?
The thing is, pc's will become more and more portable, and tons of people already do their work on laptops quite often, but these are nothing but pc's, ios has a locked system.
You're comparing apples massive market to its smaller market, if you look at the amount of pc's in the world you'll see that they quickly overshadow iphones or ipads.
The one thing ipads and iphones will take over is the web-surfing pc.
The very definition of a personal computer is the wide area of usage for it, the pc is too heavily integrated into our society to ever go away, servers, workstations, and the one free platform with interchangeable parts.
Mobile tech can never catch up to stationary tech, it's all about size and power requirements, this is why servers end up taking up entire rooms and quite a heavy chunk of power.
Todays tablets or smart phones are astronomically more powerful than the expensive workstations of the 90's, yet we're still not making games on those, why is that?
You make a lot of good points, but I still think we're going to see a massive decline in traditional desktop PCs and laptops as consumer products. They'll stay around as servers and power computing devices for sure.
I think any business that doesn't require heavy computing power will likely switch over to tablets simply because they cost less.
It seems as though everyone is pushing for locked in software and at least apple's case for locked in hardware too.
Though back to the main topic of the thread, I doubt consoles will "die" just evolve. There will be a market for people that want a dedicated gaming device.
@Ace-Angel:
I bet the porn industry is already on mobile... though I still have no iOS or Android device so I can't say for sure
It makes sense, dollar stores and bargain bins take off when the economy turns for the worse. But as things start to improve people get tired of cheap and crappy and start to crave quality. I think it would be a mistake to champion the dollar store as the new main stay that will sustain everyone in the future as things improve.
It doesn't help that when people where faced with a new tech gadget to buy there wasn't a new console competing for attention and its not surprising that people dropped a lot of coin on a phone that does a lot of stuff and goes anywhere but not on something that isn't even competing.
It doesn't help that as we got to the end of the current hardware life cycle the band-aid they slapped on the consoles (PSMove and Kinnect) didn't really manage to capture the imagination of customers like a new console would.
I personally think the next evolution will be things like Steam's box that can run a few different services including Steam. People want high quality streaming content as things keep improving and people realize that tiny screens and even pads just don't have the processing power or battery power to give them everything they want on the quality and scale they will want.
He also compares Infinity blade to Modern Warefare3. Infinity blade will no doubt kill battery life and not run on all the hardware supported under iOS. Also Modern Warfare3 wasn't all that stunning or an accurate representation of what modern games can do, they had to hit a few different levels of hardware so you shoot for the lowest common denominator.
Compare Infinity Blade to the Samaritan demo and discuss what you can and can't do. Right now mobile looks like its catching up to consoles but consoles are well past their logical lifespan. Congrats mobile you caught up to 7 year old console tech.... which is notable but will it catch up on pace when customers finally get around to getting a hardware upgrade?
I seriously doubt there will be one winner and one new gold standard for gaming, but I do think developers will need to think cross platform and incorporate mobile more and more, hopefully as an additional dimension to the game if not just another platform to enjoy similar content. If anything this will force a focus on IP and making a brand as strong as possible and as enjoyable as possible on a wider range of devices, if a company makes good use of everything.
i lost interest on the rest of the presentation ...
look at the "death" of point and click adventure games. its market never shrunk or died out, it simply became forgotten. those fans where waiting to be served new adventure games while the publishers and developers saw new money in other markets so they left that market behind. It never died out, those gamers who wanted more adventure games didn't suddenly drop dead when those big studios stopped making adventure titles. The success of the double fine kickstarter proved that that market is still there.
So you are really saying that a stationary pc costs more than a tablet of equal hardware?
It's really only apple.
Nah, the best we get is a couple of slideshows of some...thing, or pixel games with 'hidden' behind the curtains with shadows orgy.
I mean it's not as cool as the console and PC market, when you can shove a giant purple guitar with a Jar-Jar Bink's mushroom tip at the end, in your friends 'arse and play "Stairway to Heaven" while wearing a force-feedback code piece and having a bunch of anime school girls shout your name.
No that's not what I'm saying at all. What I mean is that more and more people doing say web surfing, office work, or even programming or similar tasks, who don't need all that computing power will instead go with more portable and cheaper solutions even though they are less powerful.
Who really needs all that power aside from gamers, CG professionals, server side applications, and scientific computing (which is often distributed)? Gamers will go for consoles and maybe the rumored Steam Box. The rest are a niche market when compared to all other consumers.
Check this out: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/16/apple-sold-more-iphones-than-macs-ever/
and this: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/31/despite_new_cpu_options_apple_reportedly_questioning_future_of_mac_pro.html
more: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/06/07/is-apple-planning-to-kill-off-mac-os-x/
And this (though this one's more sensationalist and playing with the numbers): http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/07/apple-sold-more-ipads-in-q4-than-any-single-pc-manufacturer/
I'll admit these are all Apple centric which is still niche and doesn't represent the computing market as a whole, but with Microsoft, Apple, and Google all pushing tablets, who's pushing desktops? Games? People always say "I like that game I wish it was on Steam." well soon we'll have Steam Box for that.
I'm not really trying to win an argument with you here
Microsoft is a little more subtle about it by forcing DirectX in as many places as possible, which makes cross platform development much more difficult than it should be. More of an economic lock than an actual one.
Certainly Apple is by far the worst offender in this area.
@Ace-Angel:
Ermm... hmm... ok... lol?
Don't have much more to add to this. But whether consoles have a healthy long life ahead of them or not it's nothing really to be worried about. If tablet truly do become strong enough we could easily just use console controllers and plug the tablet into the tv in order to get the same experience for the most part.
Likewise for a PC game experience if computer games switched to tablets there would be keyboard and mouse addions I think.
Though overall I'd say that route would be quite a bit more expensive, lots of tablets are already way too expensive, and the iPad doesn't have an SD card slot or anything does it? I personally like how I can use my desktop and add a ton of large hard drives if I want to and never worry about running out of space.
Oh! I didn't know that, wasn't paying attention to it really :poly136: I guess it'll just be Xboxes and Playstations in the future then.
Now you're saying it again, cheaper portable solutions! That's a reversed fact, I would this very instant go and purchase a tablet pc if it was cheaper than my stationary and just plug it in, everyone would, but that will never happen, it defies all logic!
Steam box would be made to bring more console gamers to the pc, read below.
It doesn't work like that, if you start stating crazy opinions you'll end up in an argument sooner or later.
No one and everyone is pushing pc hardware, the fact that the pc is an open standard in terms of how things go together means that there's no one company that owns pc's, everyone can build them, even regular consumers. Even the macs are custom-built pc's by apple running apple software.
The day indie developers and steam goes away will probably mark the death of the pc as a consumer platform, but now instead we're seeing more and more games, mmo's, EA opening up origin, the very flexibility of the pc platform is why it is in every possible sector of usage, it's a general purpose machine!
Apple, sony or microsoft will never let in valve on their platforms, that's a pretty given fact, so the rumour is that valve would make their own console, in reality this would most likely be a handbuilt pc, that runs ALL the pc games on steam.
It would be built to bring more console players towards pc, not the other way around.
Valves thrives on the pc for the very fact that it is fully free platform, and the games they sell on there also thrive because of that very fact, tons of indie games that don't have to pay licensing costs to use windows or the pc.
Apple has however been the underdog when it comes to personal computing, but they're dominating the portable phones and tablets market, which is I guess why they're thinking of their alternatives, but I don't think they'll drop the idea of their computer, THEY however might transform it, as the mac is not as crucial as an open platform to many people as the pc is, not that it wont be met without resistance.
Windows is by far the most widespread OS among pc's, that's why developers use directx which is also a pretty solid library on its own.
But no one is forced to use it, there is plenty of stuff out there that uses other libraries, or they can use opensource wrappers that compile to use whatever library is the most common one for the platform, such as SDL.
The important thing to note here is, you don't have to use directx, there's no cost to using directx, there's no cost to selling anything for windows, there's no limitations on what you can use on your windows machine, and you don't even have to use windows.
And the fact is, directx is only used on windows and the 360, it's not used on the iphone, the androids, macs, sony or nintendo platforms. Yet everyone manages to release games on both ps3 and 360.
From the Applestore cheapest macbook air is starting at $999 the new ipad $499, Googles upcoming Nexus tablet is rumored to be ~$199, that's really cheap better than most netbook prices, which a quick look at google shopping says are ~$250 - $500?.
Also I'm not saying that tablets are a desktop replacement right now, but in the future as time goes on. Obviously right now the applications needed by everyone for everything don't yet exist in tablet OS form, but I think they will sooner or later.
PC development is open and hopefully will continue to be so, but the overall thing I'm trying to get at is that I think the desktop and laptop PCs of today will evolve into something more like tablets in form factor and function if not outright become them in the future. You mention the economy of scale which is completely true, smaller tech costs more, but tech prices are always dropping as well. Won't we eventually hit a point where everyday computing needs are met with acceptably affordable, and powerful enough mobile hardware (like tablets)?
By the economic cost of cross platform development with DirectX, I mean choosing to develop using both DirectX and OpenGL, it's not free to do so. You either pay for a engine which does both (yeah Unity and UDK are free upfront but eventually you have to pay something if you're successful enough) or you write your own engine to support both which takes more time then just having to use one or the other.
I thought I read that Metro isn't going to support OpenGL at all either (or was it just the ARM version of Win8?).
EDIT:
Full disclosure: My only real beef with DirectX is that it's the reason WebGL isn't supported in Internet Explorer which irritates me very much :poly127:
Don't just compare prices, compare hardware.
Certain things definitely became replaced by tablets, like browsing the internet, checking your mail, doing things like that, they're perfect for it, it's because the tech got to the level where it became very usable for those things, and it doesn't require an open platform to check your mail.
But if you look at the new ipad you'll be able to find a stationary at a much smaller pricepoint with the same specs, that's how it'll always be.
We'll have fantastic $500 tablets in the future doing things that a new computer does today, but then we'll also have even more powerful stationary computers at the same price.
The very concept of a PC will stick around even if it moves toward being more portable when better battery-tech arrives, we're just too used to the freedom, and so are developers.
Stationary computers will pretty much be dominant until the day when we have unlimited battery-tech and can be very wasteful with our portable tech and not have to build them around using only a fraction of the power of a stationary.
Lets use this example: you'll never be older than someone who is older than you, no matter how old you get.
Tech is the same, we'll get fantastic portable tech and our phones are pretty much capable of things I couldn't imagine when I was younger, yet it's all derived from the tech that arrived 5 years before on the more power-hungry stationary tech.
It's chunkier, larger, but more powerful, there will always be more powerful tech in our stationary tech, there's really no ceiling to hit anytime soon, and it's always going to be cheaper than the newer lightweight less powerhungry portable itterations of the tech.
I'm currently coding my own "tech" for a game, it's running with sdl *and* opengl, which means I'm using both directx and opengl, it's only cost me my time which compared to other things has not been that much.
Every single tool I've used has been completely free, and I'm free to sell this without any platform limitations, and porting it should be easy too.
Just arm, and it's just metro, not the whole of windows 8.
I didn't know that SDL was a DirectX and OpenGL API... hmm...
<--- considers C++ for like the millionth time...
i own a laptop and a have had a ipad before, but when i want to do serious work, even if it is just writing up a paper or something like that, i use my desktop, and the reason isn't because of power. The reason is that it has 2 22inch monitors, a full keyboard and mouse, sits at a table with lots of desk-space for papers, and has really good speakers attached with my "ENTIRE" music collection.
it's the same deal when it comes to games, yes i could play on a portable system but i get a much better experience from my desktop, due to lots of screenspace to play on and my choice of a full keys and mouse, or gamepads.
i really only use my portable systems for communication, and while on trips, and even on trips i sometimes wont take any tech with me.
We'll always find more use for power, or if you wish I can quote that infamous half-fake bill gates quote on memory
We'll always want more power and we can't even imagine the days when we were just fine with the fraction of power we currently have.
SDL is layered on top of whatever it is compiled for, if you compile the code in windows it'll use directx, if in osx or linux it'll use the equalents over there.
But the big thing is that you don't have to rewrite your code, it should stay pretty much the same.
Everyone knows that better batterytech is something that could really help with all kind of modern portable tech, we rely quite a bunch on the powergrid, and all portable tech is built around using as little as possible and have as many power save modes as possible, and even then we don't get enough time out of stuff.
If we suddenly had a breakthrough in batterytech we'd see some very interesting things happening to portable tech.
Good to know, thanks! I think I'll try to get at SDL through haXe rather than the usual route of C++ though.