- Oct 10, 2007
- 142
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From the perspective of an engineer who works in related areas and a gamer from birth, people seem to forget that although the original consoles were dedicated hardware of their own design, most consoles are now really just rebranded PC hardware.
As such, its trivial to port currently in most cases, and even if piracy was rampant, you'd still gain more profit by taking the time to slap on an install-shield wizard. It's not a major problem if X amount of people steal it, because its not your sole revenue stream but just one of many. This is also brought up a lot if you watch G4TV when they do a review; they usually complain that it’s a straight port with no new Easter eggs or features.
Next there is the hardware development cycle, which since the PC platform is continually evolving, it produces incrementally better titles as time goes on, and consoles are on 5+ year cycles. As games on the PC turn to vertex, ray tracing, or other non polygon based rendering schemes, consoles will follow along with PDAs and other new media. The nature of this style of rendering is inherently much more platform independent as its less dependent on APIs and trickery to make images and just uses brute processing power to determine the location of each pixel (with Physics), instead of defining three points and just connecting the dots, or applying a texture.
There is actually an upper limit to realism, and as a well done Hollywood movie shows, it’s a limit we're already bumping up against. The vector processors in the PS3 are similar to designs from SSE and others used in Cray systems. It might sound silly at first, but there is actually a point in this technology when a level of realism is reached that after which further refinement is beyond human perception and the product development cycle will have to change to some degree. I think more robust AIs will be one of the few things which will really be able to take advantage of the types of speeds we will see from 2020 and beyond. Many Hollywood movies are already at this point for a lot of people who don’t look close, and this technology trickles down at a predictable rate. I think realistically we reach a point where we need a better man-machine interface to take advantage of this level of realism.
I'd say if anything that it’s not the PC that’s dead as a platform, it’s that there will be no difference between the two. They are already similar in more ways than they are different, they just come bundled with a D-Pad and have Hamachi pre-installed in the form of X-Box Live. It’s devolved into a silly fanboy rant at this point I think. In many ways, Media Center PCs are consoles, you can even add a D-Pad.
The PC can be turned into a console, and vice versa (Linux on the PS3 Anyone). Consoles now have browsers, and an adapter (that I love) for the PS3 that lets me use a keyboard because thats my control method of choice. I hate D-Pads. Let the flames begin.
Take a look at the progress of the Mac platform and ask yourself if it’s because it became more or less compatible with entrenched technology.
On the issue of piracy, I think this whole subject is just a media talking point because there wasn't another cute blond Caucasian girl abducted today for them to scare people over. Its basic folly to compare software spread to physical theft, because in all cases the costs are imagined. People just like big numbers, so they guesstimate that 100,000 people stole a game that retails for $50 USD then come to the conclusion that they somehow lost 50 Million dollars, even though software has no replication cost and the developer does not even pay for bandwidth.
In most cases, piracy made easier by trying to force DRM down people throats, which just entices hackers to take them out as a personal challenge, and it just makes everyone else angry. At the right price point, you would be amazed at how many people are willing to pay for games as entertainment.
The companies just want the types of cash flow they had from the 90s when the net was a lot slower and people had to pay 50 bucks to use their $3000 machines. But that times over, and it’s never coming back. And it does not need to, because with the spread of the internet, the number of potential customers has also jumped sky high. Charge 50,000 people $50 or 250,000 people $10, it’s all the same and the net allows this.
In the case of business software, like Office 2007, Microsoft WANTS people to steal it, which is why they translated it into Chinese with basically no copy protection. A defacto monopoly is easier if you give it away to people free at home and everyone uses it and becomes familiar, then charge businesses who have a financial incentive to not risk lawsuits and fines for theft. You never wondered why its harder to get a hacked steam account, for gaming, than it is to steal a WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEM like Vista, which is in a much better position to detect and thwart hacks and cracks because it has kernel level access and internet connectivity?
They want Asia to make it the standard everyone is used to, so that later on when people start a business or “go legit” they’ll already be hooked on their brand and go with what their used to, and it will be the standard, not OpenOffice. There is no lost income, because they were never going to buy it in the first place. The same goes for games, as the developers gain reputations and loyalty, and when pirates grow up, many pride themselves in paying for games from labels they used to steal from because they weren’t able to afford it. Look at Starcraft.
Also, subscription models work. There is not a lot of press about World of Warcraft being pirated, and since network connections are everywhere now, theres no reason they cant use a “Steam” or EA-Link type setup which requires a constantly on net connection, and bans pirated keys instantly and refuses to play offline, or takes it a step further by having certain points in the game retrieve content from servers in order to progress further.
Target market is also the last problem for PC-Only development. If you go out to make the L33t35t Haxx0r3d game with all the bells and whistles, the only people with the hardware to actually play that are the ones who also know how to steal it, and after paying for all that hardware they might be poor. So sure, sales are poor cause the game only runs on a water-cooled quad-sli Alienware system, who happened to be owned by script kiddies worldwide, is there a surprise here?
I am not trying to defend piracy or any type of theft. I’m not trying to make a moral point, but a realistic one that has a REAL solution that does not go along these lines: We’re legally in the right, and we’re going to make the world comply. Well first off you can’t make the world do anything, its going to go the path of least resistance no matter what. For people, that’s stealing things that are way too expensive for them personally (or taking illegal drugs because they can’t afford real professional care for whatever ails them, mentally or otherwise, because it’s so damn expensive).
For businesses, who earn a lot more, the least resistance is paying up the dough to ensure future revenue without lawsuits. The industry right now is indignant, and reacting like an angry shop-keep chasing off little kids. It’s acting in PRINCIPAL instead of INTELLIGENTLY and trying to apply physical security measures to digital content.
The best example is Brazil, with AIDS medication. It was way too expensive, and Big Pharma was sucking up donation money from the whole world to keep a few people alive. So the Government of Brazil said: Screw you. We don’t care if you invented it, we know you own it, but we aren’t willing to stand by and let people die just so some fat white American can have 5 billion instead of 4. So they setup their own drug labs and started making the same thing for like 65 cents a person, down from $580. Of course, Pharma sued, but no one was willing to do anything about it.
Its hard to have sympathy for greed vs. life even if the law is on the side of greed. Were they supposed to condemn millions to death? I realize comparing software piracy to medication piracy might sound odd at first, but it really boils down to the same reason in the end, it just has more urgency. Pharma finally decided to just sell it to them cheap, and it still makes a profit. The old business model is dead and unenforceable for non-tangible media which is why the music industry is trying to use scare tactics and go after a bunch of college kids and soccer moms rather than rollout a real solution. I think game developers know this but the old men in suits don’t.
This is a cost/effort ratio. If games were 10 bucks, it would not be worth the time to steal them and use only hacked servers, and people worldwide can afford them more easily. This is a Global connected world now, Americo-Centrism is a fatal error for tech businesses. There are more people outside of America than in it, as the Music industry is learning.
By the way it took 10 years for them to admit defeat, but they are finally selling DRM free songs from Amazon and soon iTunes. They realized it’s impossible to stop theft, but it’s also not needed. You don’t need to stop it; you need to make it less cost effective at which point it becomes a non-issue. People don’t steal trucks from the post office because they have a distinctive look, and there’s no market for them. They realized that with internet connectivity, people would rather buy a song with their phone for 99 cents, then have that new song auto-synch with their iPod, PC, Console, and MySpace page. Hell the effort of just moving all that around is not worth 99 cents to me, and I don’t think I am alone in that.
So I hope you made it this far, I tried to keep it interesting. I tried to just write a letter about how the whole PC-Console thing is just the old business model reaching out in a death grasp before the gap between PC and console disappeared forever, but as you can tell I was unable to do so. I fully expect people on both sides to bring it, and this is just my attempt to spread some education (as I see it) around. I fully expect people to stick this post in their sites and niggle over minor details and thus miss the point itself, so if you have a comment about something like that then fine, you’re so witty and I totally suck for having typed almost 2000 words and having the audacity to be imperfect or just nor care enough to read it 50 times to try and punk-proof it. But if there are any real contentions or counter-arguments of value, then flame on
PS: For further inspired discourse, for better or worse, I suggest people visit http://www.ted.com
They put up the archives last year, and it’s been a real treat to listen in on the leaders themselves, and how they are working to make the world a better place. The New Technology section is really quite interesting, as the experts themselves in nearly all areas put fourth their ideas on how to make the future a better place and what they are trying to do about it.
As such, its trivial to port currently in most cases, and even if piracy was rampant, you'd still gain more profit by taking the time to slap on an install-shield wizard. It's not a major problem if X amount of people steal it, because its not your sole revenue stream but just one of many. This is also brought up a lot if you watch G4TV when they do a review; they usually complain that it’s a straight port with no new Easter eggs or features.
Next there is the hardware development cycle, which since the PC platform is continually evolving, it produces incrementally better titles as time goes on, and consoles are on 5+ year cycles. As games on the PC turn to vertex, ray tracing, or other non polygon based rendering schemes, consoles will follow along with PDAs and other new media. The nature of this style of rendering is inherently much more platform independent as its less dependent on APIs and trickery to make images and just uses brute processing power to determine the location of each pixel (with Physics), instead of defining three points and just connecting the dots, or applying a texture.
There is actually an upper limit to realism, and as a well done Hollywood movie shows, it’s a limit we're already bumping up against. The vector processors in the PS3 are similar to designs from SSE and others used in Cray systems. It might sound silly at first, but there is actually a point in this technology when a level of realism is reached that after which further refinement is beyond human perception and the product development cycle will have to change to some degree. I think more robust AIs will be one of the few things which will really be able to take advantage of the types of speeds we will see from 2020 and beyond. Many Hollywood movies are already at this point for a lot of people who don’t look close, and this technology trickles down at a predictable rate. I think realistically we reach a point where we need a better man-machine interface to take advantage of this level of realism.
I'd say if anything that it’s not the PC that’s dead as a platform, it’s that there will be no difference between the two. They are already similar in more ways than they are different, they just come bundled with a D-Pad and have Hamachi pre-installed in the form of X-Box Live. It’s devolved into a silly fanboy rant at this point I think. In many ways, Media Center PCs are consoles, you can even add a D-Pad.
The PC can be turned into a console, and vice versa (Linux on the PS3 Anyone). Consoles now have browsers, and an adapter (that I love) for the PS3 that lets me use a keyboard because thats my control method of choice. I hate D-Pads. Let the flames begin.
Take a look at the progress of the Mac platform and ask yourself if it’s because it became more or less compatible with entrenched technology.
On the issue of piracy, I think this whole subject is just a media talking point because there wasn't another cute blond Caucasian girl abducted today for them to scare people over. Its basic folly to compare software spread to physical theft, because in all cases the costs are imagined. People just like big numbers, so they guesstimate that 100,000 people stole a game that retails for $50 USD then come to the conclusion that they somehow lost 50 Million dollars, even though software has no replication cost and the developer does not even pay for bandwidth.
In most cases, piracy made easier by trying to force DRM down people throats, which just entices hackers to take them out as a personal challenge, and it just makes everyone else angry. At the right price point, you would be amazed at how many people are willing to pay for games as entertainment.
The companies just want the types of cash flow they had from the 90s when the net was a lot slower and people had to pay 50 bucks to use their $3000 machines. But that times over, and it’s never coming back. And it does not need to, because with the spread of the internet, the number of potential customers has also jumped sky high. Charge 50,000 people $50 or 250,000 people $10, it’s all the same and the net allows this.
In the case of business software, like Office 2007, Microsoft WANTS people to steal it, which is why they translated it into Chinese with basically no copy protection. A defacto monopoly is easier if you give it away to people free at home and everyone uses it and becomes familiar, then charge businesses who have a financial incentive to not risk lawsuits and fines for theft. You never wondered why its harder to get a hacked steam account, for gaming, than it is to steal a WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEM like Vista, which is in a much better position to detect and thwart hacks and cracks because it has kernel level access and internet connectivity?
They want Asia to make it the standard everyone is used to, so that later on when people start a business or “go legit” they’ll already be hooked on their brand and go with what their used to, and it will be the standard, not OpenOffice. There is no lost income, because they were never going to buy it in the first place. The same goes for games, as the developers gain reputations and loyalty, and when pirates grow up, many pride themselves in paying for games from labels they used to steal from because they weren’t able to afford it. Look at Starcraft.
Also, subscription models work. There is not a lot of press about World of Warcraft being pirated, and since network connections are everywhere now, theres no reason they cant use a “Steam” or EA-Link type setup which requires a constantly on net connection, and bans pirated keys instantly and refuses to play offline, or takes it a step further by having certain points in the game retrieve content from servers in order to progress further.
Target market is also the last problem for PC-Only development. If you go out to make the L33t35t Haxx0r3d game with all the bells and whistles, the only people with the hardware to actually play that are the ones who also know how to steal it, and after paying for all that hardware they might be poor. So sure, sales are poor cause the game only runs on a water-cooled quad-sli Alienware system, who happened to be owned by script kiddies worldwide, is there a surprise here?
I am not trying to defend piracy or any type of theft. I’m not trying to make a moral point, but a realistic one that has a REAL solution that does not go along these lines: We’re legally in the right, and we’re going to make the world comply. Well first off you can’t make the world do anything, its going to go the path of least resistance no matter what. For people, that’s stealing things that are way too expensive for them personally (or taking illegal drugs because they can’t afford real professional care for whatever ails them, mentally or otherwise, because it’s so damn expensive).
For businesses, who earn a lot more, the least resistance is paying up the dough to ensure future revenue without lawsuits. The industry right now is indignant, and reacting like an angry shop-keep chasing off little kids. It’s acting in PRINCIPAL instead of INTELLIGENTLY and trying to apply physical security measures to digital content.
The best example is Brazil, with AIDS medication. It was way too expensive, and Big Pharma was sucking up donation money from the whole world to keep a few people alive. So the Government of Brazil said: Screw you. We don’t care if you invented it, we know you own it, but we aren’t willing to stand by and let people die just so some fat white American can have 5 billion instead of 4. So they setup their own drug labs and started making the same thing for like 65 cents a person, down from $580. Of course, Pharma sued, but no one was willing to do anything about it.
Its hard to have sympathy for greed vs. life even if the law is on the side of greed. Were they supposed to condemn millions to death? I realize comparing software piracy to medication piracy might sound odd at first, but it really boils down to the same reason in the end, it just has more urgency. Pharma finally decided to just sell it to them cheap, and it still makes a profit. The old business model is dead and unenforceable for non-tangible media which is why the music industry is trying to use scare tactics and go after a bunch of college kids and soccer moms rather than rollout a real solution. I think game developers know this but the old men in suits don’t.
This is a cost/effort ratio. If games were 10 bucks, it would not be worth the time to steal them and use only hacked servers, and people worldwide can afford them more easily. This is a Global connected world now, Americo-Centrism is a fatal error for tech businesses. There are more people outside of America than in it, as the Music industry is learning.
By the way it took 10 years for them to admit defeat, but they are finally selling DRM free songs from Amazon and soon iTunes. They realized it’s impossible to stop theft, but it’s also not needed. You don’t need to stop it; you need to make it less cost effective at which point it becomes a non-issue. People don’t steal trucks from the post office because they have a distinctive look, and there’s no market for them. They realized that with internet connectivity, people would rather buy a song with their phone for 99 cents, then have that new song auto-synch with their iPod, PC, Console, and MySpace page. Hell the effort of just moving all that around is not worth 99 cents to me, and I don’t think I am alone in that.
So I hope you made it this far, I tried to keep it interesting. I tried to just write a letter about how the whole PC-Console thing is just the old business model reaching out in a death grasp before the gap between PC and console disappeared forever, but as you can tell I was unable to do so. I fully expect people on both sides to bring it, and this is just my attempt to spread some education (as I see it) around. I fully expect people to stick this post in their sites and niggle over minor details and thus miss the point itself, so if you have a comment about something like that then fine, you’re so witty and I totally suck for having typed almost 2000 words and having the audacity to be imperfect or just nor care enough to read it 50 times to try and punk-proof it. But if there are any real contentions or counter-arguments of value, then flame on
PS: For further inspired discourse, for better or worse, I suggest people visit http://www.ted.com
They put up the archives last year, and it’s been a real treat to listen in on the leaders themselves, and how they are working to make the world a better place. The New Technology section is really quite interesting, as the experts themselves in nearly all areas put fourth their ideas on how to make the future a better place and what they are trying to do about it.
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