Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Thursday, November 21, 2002
14:03 - In the interest of balance	(top)
J Greely reminded me of something I think I'd mentioned before in passing-- a potential reason to root for the Xbox. This would be that there seems to be a general trend in the gaming industry toward console platforms, and away from the PC. This is happening through the integration of networking, high-definition video output, hard drives, and keyboard/mouse input into consoles across the board. This will equalize consoles with PCs as far as inherent architectural differences go; MMORPGS and other text-heavy and saved-data-heavy games could be played on consoles just as well as on a computer. I'm still skeptical in some cases (third-person shooters and RPGs that rely on printing huge amounts of tiny text to the screen work much better when you're sitting close to a high-res monitor than if you're sitting ten feet away from a big-screen TV, even if it is HD). But it seems that's where the industry is headed. I can in fact see reasons why PC game companies would have an interest in developing for consoles instead of the PC, if they can get away with it. It's a standardized hardware platform; the APIs are guaranteed to work; and there would be no tedious development of convoluted installer scripts to deal with. Just press a disc and off it goes. I can even see why it would be in Microsoft's interest to push game development onto the Xbox. Surely it would mean a huge reduction in R&D costs for them-- no more need to keep DirectX chicken-wired together, no more need to worry about new hardware drivers and security issues. If Microsoft were to shift their focus from pandering to gaming on the PC and to the Xbox, instead of trying to own both and push both ahead, then things could turn out quite well for all involved. Because what it would mean would be a major shift away from what drives PC development. There would no longer be this mad headlong rush toward new video cards that push more gigatexels every week; instead, desktop PC development would slow down to a saner level. Since the gulf between games and non-game apps in demand on hardware has been getting wider and wider, suddenly there would be a whole lot less pressure on the PC market to forge ahead at the same breakneck pace. Intel probably wouldn't like this, and nor would NVidia and ATI-- and nor would Dell and HP, who wouldn't be selling as many replacement machines every two years anymore. But even so, it might be a good direction for companies like Microsoft to move in, if the economies of scale work out that way. It's already been proven that as far as technological merit goes, a closed and dedicated box with a relatively low-powered CPU and other such modest statistics can hold its own against the software made for the most top-end PC hardware. Now the only things to overcome are the aspects of games that are uniquely "PC"-- and the cult of upgrades that currently defines the personal computer market. If that happens, Apple stands to gain a lot of credibility. Suddenly the whole "speed" thing wouldn't matter so much anymore, either in perceived merit or in actual practical matters. Software availability (for which read "game availability") would no longer be as much of an issue. And an entirely different class of buyers would make up the majority of the market, buyers with different values and needs. I don't imagine that this kind of outcome could be a bad one for Apple. Or for Linux or FreeBSD or anybody else who doesn't currently have an entrenched gaming market. So, maybe I ought to be looking at the Xbox as evidence of Microsoft's commitment to a future that I have no argument with. It's a long shot, and if it happens that way it'll be the first in a long series of Microsoft-related outcomes that turns out in a way that I find amenable. It could just as easily turn out that PC games continue to dominate the technological landscape and the Xbox ends up dominating the console market. But hey, there's a glass-half-full way to see everything, isn't there?