Console standardization

True, but having non-standardized console allows for software devs to mess around with hardware-dependent inputs such as controls. The difference between comparing a standardized player format for DVDs and video games is that one requires minimal interaction (sit back, chug a beer, enjoy), while the other requires you to actually do something, even if it is just button mashing. There's a reason why the fan dumb was whining about the changed controls for XBLA's port of Perfect Dark, it's because it altered the overall experience of playing the game, and did so in a manner that they weren't particularly impressed with. Plus if something ever happened to that standardized format, you could pretty much count on kissing vast swaths of the video game industry goodbye (imagine if the entire video game industry rode on the 3DO back in '94)...

edited 10th Oct '10 10:30:04 PM by CaptainNapalm

Let's play a game about Pokémon...

I'm not getting what "Something" could happen to it, and I'm afraid I don't know what a 3DO is.

The one-console future will never happen, but the one-console standard could and would be beneficial.

The problem is that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo would actually have to agree on it and that will never happen.

Wizard Needs Food Badly

The 3DO was a standardized console designed to kick off the 32-bit era by a consortium of electronics manufacturers, it was licensed so that everybody and their dog could make 3DO-compatible consoles. Sadly, it was way too expensive ($700 in 1994) so it bombed.

A better example of a standardized console would be the MSX, which was a console and PC smushed together, sort of like the C64 or Sega SG-1000, it was upgradeable enough to span two or three generations, but it was also a somewhat open standard that saw units produced under numerous brands. It was actually pretty popular.

This leads nicely to what I imagine the ideal console would be, as as Roxor noted in another thread, a fake “console” that's actually just a cheap PC with controllers and standards-promulgating game launcher front-end software. With standards compliant games and accessories, the user experience would be identical to a real console, except developers wouldn't have to pay devkit tax and you could upgrade your hardware a bit.

Eric,

That sounds exactly like the Amiga CD-32.

I gotta admit, thinking about this is one of the times gamers annoy me. To them, "there are multiple competing consoles" is just the way things work and any suggestion that it should be different is immediately poo-pooed away. It's Tradition, and we can't go messing with tradition!

As the other guy so clearly pointed out, movies have not suffered for having a unified medium, nor have paintings, the printed novel, or anything else. Video games are unique in the whole "console wars" respect, and then, only for console games—PC Gaming has, of course, more or less always had just one platform. Funny that this did not lead to a dearth of innovation—quite the opposite in fact.

I imagine if the "console standards" idea took off, it would be something like PC Gaming: The majority of players would be able to play the game, but you'd get different benefits depending on your player (actually, DVD Players already do something like this—not all players have upscaling, PAL to NTSC or the ability to turn off regions after all).

But first, you got to get past the "this is how gaming works, this is how gaming has always worked and will always work" mentality.

And the 3DO isn't a good example. That's like using the Betamax to prove that home video would never work.

The Kagami topic has now reached 201 posts! (Nov 5)

Tradition? Fuck that shit.

No, seriously. I don't give a shit about tradition.

Honestly, a single-console future of gaming sounds like it would be fucking awesome, but every gamer in the fucking universe is too much of a stupid shit to acknowledge that fact.

I am a proud member of the Western Federation's Anti-Japan Media Task Force. My work is very important.

Standardisation of consoles is really needed. I'm sure back in 1980 there were arguments similar to this about the P Cs of the time needing standardisation. Thanks to IBM making such wise decisions to use cheap and readily-available hardware, we've got standards for P Cs.

You can put together pretty-much any PC hardware made in the last few years, install Windows, and expect to be able to run probably around 90% of all Windows software written in the last 15 years just fine. Sure, depending on what hardware you used some of the more demanding programs will probably run a bit slow, but the important thing is that they'll run.

Consoles currently do not provide any such standardisation.

I think the multitude of games consoles needs to go the way of the multitude of varieties of PC there were in the 1970s and 1980s. Merge the desktop PC with the games console. Use the same hardware and operating system for both. What works on one should work on the other.

In short, kill the distinction between "console games" and "PC games" and just have "video games". Whether you want to play sitting at a desk with a keyboard and mouse and showing the video on a monitor or sitting on your lounge with a gamepad in your hands and watching the video on your TV, it shouldn't matter. All that should matter is having a computer fast enough to run the game you want to play. Nothing more.

Accidental mistakes are forgivable, intentional ones are not.

Maybe then I'll be able to play ACE Online with my X Box 360 controller...

Nothing to see here, move along.

I am a proud member of the Western Federation's Anti-Japan Media Task Force. My work is very important.

^^ If you want to get really technical, then one could argue that computers still haven't been fully standardized. Otherwise, I wouldn't be typing on a Mac right now. Besides, having multiple players, even if it's a very lopsided duopoly, still forces any dominant players from becoming complacent and releasing new products with minimal improvements.

I wouldn't mind too much if there was a standardized console architecture (makes it easier to buy hardware), it's just that I don't see such a scenario being conducive to innovation without at least one player sitting out from a standardized format...

Let's play a game about Pokémon...

The problem with making a console out of PC parts is that the creator of the console doesn't actually own any of the parts. This means that the ones who do own the parts are free to take the parts of the console off the market. Xbox lost money for Microsoft exactly due to this fact. Besides, if you wanted a console made out of PC parts, you can just... buy a gaming PC! Most PC games now support controllers, and you can easily hook them up to an HDTV.

Wizard Needs Food Badly

@Glowsquid: Heh, yeah, I also thought of mentioning that or the CDTV and the Pippin, but that's kind of redundant.

I think I'd disagree with that on numerous counts. Most saliently, IBM made all sorts of incredibly dumb decisions for the PC's architecture, most of the parts only became cheap after IBM chose to mass-produce them, and it was only through strenuous legal battles against IBM that cloners like Compaq created a “standard.” Second, I think the death of truly distinct PC platforms (Mac, Amiga, ST, Acorn, etc…) and later the death of any competitors against Intel (PowerPC, Cyrix, AMD may be on their last legs too) has resulted in enormous stagnation.

@Game Guru GG: The Xbox wasn't functionally a true PC, but a typical console with games written on the “bare metal.” If it played normal PC games, MS could've just swapped out the hardware for whatever the cheapest/most available parts of equivalent or greater power were.

The problem with “just buy a gaming PC” is the need to worry about PC-type problems, I don't care about this, but a lot of people seem to. If the user experience was identical, there would no longer be any logical argument for owning a console. Also, you'd be able to play current-gen “console” games by just popping them into your desktop rig, which would be awesome.

Eric,

edited 11th Oct '10 8:32:03 PM by EricDVH

I prefer that they remain non-standardized, since each company offers a completely different experience and price point. I'd rather not be stuck choosing just one approach.

What I would like it see is more standardization in actual computer components. Because right now they're a real fucking mess. It's kind of annoying never knowing if part A is going to play nice with part B, or whether driver X is going to start spreading rumors that driver Y is a slut to all the other software or not.

edited 11th Oct '10 8:44:55 PM by Miijhal

Of course, the Xbox wasn't a true PC. If it was a PC, it would be a PC and not a console. That doesn't change the fact that the Xbox was made with off-the-shelf PC parts, and lost money due to it.

The problems that PC has in terms of gaming is because of standardization. Like you said, one would have to swap out the hardware for whatever the cheapest/most available parts of equivalent or greater power were, which is exactly what MS did with the Xbox. The problem is that after a certain point, the off-the-shelf parts become too cheap to make any money, and go out of production.

There are two choices once this happens. One option is that a company would have to stop dropping the price to make a profit since the company would be forced to go with better parts and gimp their power to the level of the standard which is what the Xbox did. The other option is that a company would have to make games that can utilize that extra power the system has now, which is what causes the problems that PC has.

For a console standardization to work, it must have third things. First, it must be made from custom parts that any factory could make. Second, the designers of the console need to license the standard out for other companies to make. Third and most importantly, the console must be able to make a profit Day 1.

Console hardware is normally sold at a loss because the money is made back in the console's games. No company will build an item if they are going to lose money on it and not make that money back some other way. Only one console maker in the history of video games fits that crucial third criteria: Nintendo.

Wizard Needs Food Badly

The problems that the PC has for console gamers are purely interface and marketing related. Many of them are advantages for people like me (and some even exist for consoles in a few cases,) so “console mode” would be purely optional, but imagine if you could skip these steps with certain “pre-certified” PCs:

1. Spec out a PC or upgrade that will play the games you want
2. Configure PC
3. Update PC
4. Reboot
5. Configure more
6. Choose a game that your PC's specs meet
7. Install game
8. Resolve any bugs in the game
9. Configure game
10. Keep track of ancillary files like INIs, saves, and mods.
11. Update and/or resolve bugs in now elderly game again after enough PC upgrades/updates

Regarding the Xbox, it wasn't really made from commodity PC parts, seeing as how its chipset became a rather idiosyncratic commodity PC part: The first line of nVidia nForce motherboards.

Eric,

I actually skip all of those steps in most of the PC games I own, but then I don't buy the latest and greatest PC games.

Actually, on the PC standards thing that previous people had mentioned. IBM actually wasn't expecting the PC to be cloned as much as it was or that Microsoft would actually put in their contract that they didn't need IBM's approval to sell their OS's to anyone who would make a PC clone.

What is interesting was that console gaming was headed in the same direction as PC Gaming at the time. The Atari 2600 could easily be made with off-the-shelf parts as the Coleco Gemini proved. In addition, thanks to Activision anybody could make Atari 2600 games. But then the Atari Debacle happened and pretty much everyone who might've cared to improve on the Atari 2600 went out of video game business. Europe was happy with the Commodore 64 and Japan just got the Famicom.

Wizard Needs Food Badly

Your second paragraph is a truth SO many people forget, that the IBM PC compatible was an accident of history. Your comment about Microsoft's Rules Lawyering is also funny when one considers they recycled the same ploy to keep Windows from being sued into oblivion by Apple: Early in the Macintosh deployment, Apple negotiated MS as 3rd-party Mac developer, but when MS Windows was revealed years later and Apple sued MS for blatant copycatting, MS cited wording in the contract they'd drawn up and signed to write Mac programs as giving MS free reign to recycle the Mac's system for any reason.

Eric,

Cats and dogs! Living together!

Anyways.

I don't see it necessarily having that much of an impact on the quality of the actual games. As has been stated, there hasn't been a problem with the quality of PC games due to the relative standardization of the platform (or at least the operating system).

Of course, it isn't going to happen. There'd have to be some cross-company cooperation to make this standardized system, which isn't going to happen, or they'd have to cease having their systems be proprietary, which also isn't going to happen. Selling their consoles is sort of what they do. Their money comes from selling the consoles and charging developers to release their games on the console. If they cease to have control over their own console, they don't have much of a business plan.

One big proprietary master system shared by all the companies isn't going to work. They aren't going to work together in the first place, but even if they did, that creates a sort of monopoly, which isn't good for anyone. Game prices would likely go up, and the quality of the console itself would go down, because who else are you going to buy from? That is, until someone else releases their own console to fill that alternative niche in the market, at which point, standardization is gone. But like I said, it wouldn't happen in the first place.

I don't see a standardised architecture and operating system driving up the price of games. Take a look in the Steam store. As of 15 Oct 2010 there are 710 games priced under $10 and of those, 238 are priced under $5. If anything, the price of PC games has come down since I was a kid.

Accidental mistakes are forgivable, intentional ones are not.

The 16-bit Console Wars were responsible for making some of the most awesome games ever, so I'm more in favor of a bipartisan market with two ruling consoles.

The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!

DVD players prove this wrong.

The Kagami topic has now reached 201 posts! (Nov 5)

^ DVD players also deal with a vastly more passive media than consoles. There's a difference between pushing "play" or "skip scene" for a 2 hour movie and playing a video game by actively mashing buttons or moving the controller around for 2 hours...

Let's play a game about Pokémon...

As I see it, the main problem with multiple console systems are the greasy, corpulent cretins bleating at each other between swigs of diabetes-inducing Energy Piss, about the supposed superiority of their choice of games-playing unit.

"Look! Mine has these games, you can't have them! We get this widget! Our graphics are better! Your mum! SQUEEEAAAL SQUEEEEAAAL" etc.

If there were one unified console, the buffoons would find some other reason to fling spittle-flecked, sweaty invectives at each other.

edited 15th Oct '10 8:13:00 AM by EthZee

The main reason we can't have a standardized console is that the very buisness models of the companies depend on having exclusivity.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

To say nothing of anti-monopoly/anti-trust law.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."