From: Yak Wax (yakwax@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Oct 28 2000 - 10:01:52 PDT
Cameron Barrett wrote:
> A Feed magazine article [1] says that where Sony
> charges a $25,000 fee to game developers in order
> to develop games for the PS2, Microsoft plans to
> charge no fee.
MS will make royalties on every XBox game sold. They
wanted to go with an open development model but it
turns out that consoles are marketed on things like
brand identity and quality software rather than the
empty promises of Silicon Valley; the developers asked
them to charge royalties rather than just throw a box
out there and hope someone develops something "neat".
Sony has the problem of marketing the device rather
than the games (they don't have any) and now several
million japanese have DVD-players and couldn't care
less about the games (or lack of). (It'll probably
sell more games in the US due to the citizenship being
use to ugly boxes that run crap software.) MS will
probably have the same problem. Nintendo is the only
one who'll produce the games, but nobody wants to pay
attention.
> It's a safe bet that since Indrema is an open source
> company [2], that the game development specs will
> also be open source, available to any developer who
> wants them.
Is open source really applicable to games in any
significant way? Game developers have a lot invested
in the closed development model.
> My bet is that the 2001-2002 gaming console market
> will be a tough fight between Microsoft and a number
> of competitors, including Indrema, but not
> necessarily Sony.
It'll probably be XBox (and only because it has a hard
drive, and you need that to move beyond the "find
button that opens door" puzzles that plague consoles),
Sony on merit that it has a large installed user base
already, and Nintendo GameCube for those who like to
actually play games rather than unlock new video
sequences by engaging in random battles with anime
characters. It's important to remember that these are
consumer devices rather than generic PCs and there can
be more than one just so long as they differentiate
themselves, Nintendo seems to be doing a good job of
that. I doubt Indrema has much of a chance. (Also,
I'm really suprised that console programmers haven't
reacted to XBox having such an ugly CPU.)
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