Could Nintendo Survive Going 3rd Party?

[Serebii]

I'm no expect on the matter, but manufacturers of DVD and Bluray players do have to uphold to a certain standard to be allowed a licence to put a dvd player on the market. I remember hearing this was a reason why Nintendo didn't put in a DVD playback option with the Wii.

 

Same thing could be done with consoles.

 

That said, I think we are already at this situation you describe, if you look at some of the multiplats that get released. There are plenty of instances where a game has had a noticeably worse framerate on one console over another or worse loading times etc.

And we'd end up with a situation where Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo make the best of the standard platforms and the games their studios make work perfectly on their ones.

[liger05]

If Nintendo did something wrong, then you'd have a point. I do complain when Nintendo does something stupid. As evidenced by when they announced they weren't doing an E3 conference.

 

However, you're assuming these things can be done instantly. They need to finetune the emulators first, which takes a while. Then, for each game, they have to finetune it and that takes a short time too. Then, they need to bug-test it.

 

It's not a "Oh, let's drag and drop this ROM" situation. Please think things through before you complain.

 

How about this. Dont commit to launch dates when the hardware isnt ready.

 

I really dont find it too much to ask for services whiich the console provides to be up and running on day 1. I'm going to get a PS4 @ launch and again would be upset if PSN store was not avaliable on day 1.

[Serebii]

How about this. Dont commit to launch dates when the hardware isnt ready.

 

I really dont find it too much to ask for services whiich the console provides to be up and running on day 1. I'm going to get a PS4 @ launch and again would be upset if PSN store was not avaliable on day 1.

Never, for either of the consoles, did they say the Virtual Console would be at launch.

 

Also, Sony have said that various of the PS4's features that have been shown will not be available at launch, so have Microsoft with Xbox One features.

[Hogge]

"next generation" doesn't exist. It's propaganda. A genius marketing idea. And one which only makes sense under the current situation, too.

It makes perfect sense.

It's this and this generation, thus I have a selection of three consoles. Regardless of which I buy, I know that all games for that console will run smoothly and flawlessly for that console. And because there only are three consoles, I can easily keep track of which one is more powerful, reliable and I can also be fairly certain for how many more years I'll be able to play the latest games on it.

 

 

As for who decides when to kick things up a notch, the market regulates itself, the hardware designers will decide. The others can keep up or get left behind. That's how things work.

Yes, it's going to be like the PC market. Except the hardware would be simplified. Like consoles. Imagine if you only had to buy 1 console every 6~7 years to be able to keep up with and enjoy any and all video games.

That's how the console business works today. A console comes out, and then it's replaced after 5-7 years. In fact, all I've been hearing for the last 4 years is PC gamers moaning on how the current console generation is SO out of date and are holding the graphics back.

The Xbox 360 was launched in late 2005, so by the time the XBONE comes out, it'll be eight years old. And Microsoft are talking about continuing to support the 360 for a couple of years more. That's ten years of being able to play so near it makes no difference, all the latest games (not counting Nintendo games of course). Sony too are talking about giving the PS3 a 10+ year lifespan.

With hardware developers being allowed to release new models whenever they want, we won't have this.

I've got friends who claim to have 7 year old PC's that they play games on. Only, when I ask them, they admit that they've spent a fair share of money on swapping parts to be able to keep up with the latest games.

And better yet, under a standardized market, you have backwards compatibility in every single hardware unit. Not to mention a more unified audience, meaning all developers will be working towards the same mass audience.

Have you tried to play an old PC game lately? You have to download patches to make games run on new operating systems, sometimes these patches are fan made, because the developer wants you to buy the new game instead of the old one. But more often than not, there aren't patches. With let's say a Wii, I know that I can play every Nintendo home console game since 2001, without the hassle of any patches or glitches.

 

Besides, game development is reaching a technical peak, we are now beginning to deal with resolutions that don't even make sense unless you're playing your games with a projector on a huge wall... Technically speaking the advances are going to slow down to a crawl in the next 10 years, soon there will be nowhere left to go.

What makes you think we're reaching a technical peak? There are greater draw distances, more advanced shaders, better AI and more advanced physics to be acheived.

 

Not to mention acheiving every game designers wet dream: no optimization. Not wasting any time on making game-specific resources. We have code to render 3D waves that physically affects objects in the water, and 3D soldier meshes from our latest FPS, where we've rendered every fuzzy fibre in their balaclava, and AI where every single soldier behaves rationally and finds his way across the battlefield without pre-programmed waypoints. Let's just toss them in to our flight simulator, so that we don't have to waste any resources on anything except for what we need.

 

 

3DO was standardization? oO A half assed attempt by one brand isn't standardization, standardization is an industry consensus, not a whim of one single company. Standardization has never happened, and sadly may never happen.

Sorry, but that's exactly how it'll go down if it'll ever go down. The PC standard was a whim by IBM, where they sought out a company to make a standard OS, then they licensed that OS to other computer manufacturers. That's how Android happened: Google decided to make an OS that would be licensed to all phonemakers who desire to use it.

 

3DO may have failed, but it's essentially how any future standardization will look like. One company will have to rule the platform. That's the way it has to be, because otherwise all hardware manufacturers will have small differences to set them apart, which will make compatibility go out the window and kill off the point of having a standardisation to begin with.

[dwarf]

We can all intuit the state of the industry after everything goes third party, or after x/y happens, but not even the people working in the industry really know. They'll be puzzling over these questions too because the industry is so unpredictable. The unified model Oxigen is talking about will suit some businesses/developers down to the ground, but it won't suit others. You can say the model will be a benefit to consumers, and you might be right, but the consumers aren't holding all the cards.

 

Sony probably wants to keep the industry fractured because it's still a hardware company at its core, yet it can have the best of both worlds now that they're rolling out the Playstation brand over phones and PC's, and importantly they get to regulate those avenues themselves.

Edited July 24, 2013 by dwarf