On Console Commoditization

Denis Dyack is an interesting character. While you have to respect someone who’s that vocal and passionately committed to his craft, I do have to disagree with his point of view on a regular basis. Electronic Arts and Dyack have both been quoted in popular press advocating for a single console that all developers can target without having to port their code.

Gamasutra published a summary of a talk Dyack gave at GDC Lyon 2007 this morning where he stated that not only was it desirable, it was inevitable. I have some major problems with most of the points he brings up. He implies that all technology will inherently become commoditized in the long run, distinguishable only by brand, and cites automobiles, cameras, and cell phones as examples of this.

Here’s a fun experiment you should try at home. Go to your nearest auto shop, tell them your indicator lights are burnt out, and you need new ones. Surely if automobiles are commodities, and are standardized, you should be able to do this. Except you can’t, in fact it doesn’t even help if you tell them the manufacturer of the car in question. You need to know the manufacturer, model, and year of manufacture to be able to nail down something as simple as indicator lights. This is true for nearly every component in your car.

Try buying a new lens for your DSLR camera. If you walk into a camera store and say you want a new 120 mm lens, but you don’t know the manufacturer and mount of your camera, you’re going to get some strange looks.

The entire industry of companies who’s sole purpose is to wrap existing software in their Java-based framework, and port it to every cell-phone known to man. This is not trivial, they need to maintain databases of all cell-phones they support, and adjust display sizes, input mappings, color depth, etc. to support this supposedly ‘open framework’. If you ever wondered why cell-phone games are such shit, this is a major contributing factor.

Nevertheless, all of these industries do have certain standards. These standards exist because it is beneficial to all of the manufacturers of these devices that they are inter-operable with each other. This is why cameras will all save in JPEG format, cars all run on relatively similar gasoline, and cellphones all connect to networks using a very small scope of protocols. There are infrastructural costs that are prohibitive for manufacturers to independently build on their own, so it behooves them to adopt standards for individual benefit. The fact that this happens to benefit the public is incidental.

I would argue that there already exists an ‘open-platform’ for game development. It’s called Microsoft Windows, and it runs on a PC. Using DirectX, you don’t need to care specifically what hardware a user has, you just write it such that it can handle a certain spectrum you’re willing to tolerate. Dyack dismisses the PC as a standardized platform, I assume he means that all PCs do not have the same hardware, and thus are not standard. This seems to be at odds with his previous statements regarding the standardization of cars, digital cameras, and cell phones, as none of the above have the same hardware either.

He’s right about one thing though. In a one console future, the publishers, the developers would win big time. This is probably why you only hear about this kind of thing from developers like Dyack who are feeling the portability pain, and publishers like EA that have to pay for it. While consumers would theoretically win, I would argue that they largely don’t give a shit at the moment. Most people are not going to buy more than one console, and certainly not all three. Fortunately for them, most games are available on multiple consoles, so it doesn’t affect them (and Dyack argues that exclusive content is becoming more rare anyway, thus making this a moot point).

Unfortunately, the people who don’t win in this scenario are the manufacturers. Nintendo’s entire business strategy is built around differentiating their hardware in unique ways to spawn entire genres of games that only work on their systems. A one console world is not a good place for Nintendo to be in, and they will fold up shop before they agree to that deal. The ‘economic realities’ don’t snuff up against real innovation, and Nintendo has been taking innovation to the bank since the release of the Wii.

If you believe the reports on hardware pricing, Microsoft and Sony both lose money on hardware. The method by which they regain profits is then by issuing licensing fees against developers who want to make games for their console. Selling commodity consoles completely undermines this business model. Game by their very nature push the boundaries of what is possible with hardware, so unless studios stop being interesting in creating beautiful photo-realistic graphics, this medium is going to require some expensive hardware, and that means licensing costs.

Unlike in the car industry, the cell phone industry, and the camera industry, console manufacturers have nothing to gain by adopting an open standard against which all game will run, and certainly have no interest in becoming a commodity - trust me. Nokia doesn’t want to be a commodity either, it’s just an unfortunate artifact of adopting standards due to prohibitive capital costs of not doing so. The console industry does not suffer this problem, and thus I wouldn’t be advising Silicon Knights or Electronic Arts to be holding their breath for the arrival of the one true platform. I know it sucks gentlemen, but unless you have a way to force the market conditions in a different direction, I would suggest focusing on making great game experiences and leave the economic talk alone.

As a disclaimer, I was not at Lyon GDC 2007, and so I may be misinterpreting the reports of what Dyack actually said. If by some bizarre artifact Denis ends up reading this, I would encourage him or anyone else who was at the talk to set me straight.

All that is good in the world

Yesterday I attended a recruiting session given by Denis Dyack and some of the team from Silicon Knights here at the University of Waterloo. I don’t think I made a complete fool of myself, but it was definitely one of the first times in my life I’ve managed to stutter and ramble in anxiety, so I guess I must have liked what they had to say. While I’m not interested in writing a plug for SK, I will say that many of the things they said over the course of that two hours resonated strongly with me. There’s a lot of issues with working the games industry that are hard to judge without actually working in it, despite the amount of blogs you read or development magazines you might subscribe to. SK strikes me as a place where they strongly and fundamentally understand a lot of these issues in a way I agree with, and I thought I’d go through a few of them.

Employee Recognition

Much of the games industry has a reputation for being essentially a meat grinder: taking fresh graduates, putting them into high-stress, long hour positions and running them until they burn out, at which time they’re replaced by fresh employees. I really believe that if you’re going to create great games, you need great people. Game design is an incredibly complex and sophisticated process, and much like any other medium that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, the people in the company are the ones that make it happen. If you don’t make those employees feel like what they do matters, and that they are valued, you’re going to lose them. You might be able to make money churning shit out the door, but nobody is going to celebrate it. Why not reach for the sky.

Lateral Movement

The baby boomer generation has been known for finding a company and sticking with them for their entire lives. Generation X is characterized by the opposite, hoping from company to company and job to job as suits their fancy. Generation Y, the current generation of new graduates and the one I happened to belong to is characterized by a mix of the two. Gen Y wants to stay with one company, but they want to do different things. Gen Y wants all the advantages of changing up your job, keeping it fresh, while retaining the benefits of staying in one organization long-term. Making it easy to move around in the company will attract Gen Y, help keep your employees interested in what they do, and at the same time groom people who are familiar with the whole of the game making process.

Continuing Education

Once upon a time, it was very rare to get a Bachelor’s Degree, much less a Bachelor’s Degree in a field such as Math or Engineering. In Canada, there are approximately 65,000 Professional Engineers. Presently, there are around 27,000 students in an accredited Engineering program. Clearly, the marginal value of the Bachelor’s degree declines significantly when the market is flooded, and a large number of us for these reasons, as well as the joy of learning, are interested in pursuing a Master’s or PhD. Supporting your employees in pursuing higher education, and arranging it so that their jobs are open when they finish can help infuse the organization with much more rare and sophisticated talent, and when your business is making compelling content and pushing hardware to its limits, there’s no way that can be a bad thing.

Games as High Art

It’s been said that games may one day be the dominant form of entertainment. Certainly as the generations who grew up with video games age, console systems will become as prevalent as cable subscriptions. However in order to truly bring video games into their own, developers will have to start making more games which are on par with Hollywood blockbusters, as well as classic critically acclaimed films. There’s a lot of mumbling about this going on right now. Certainly some developers have made piles of money and games which are really fun to play, while largely ignoring story. To me, this is similar to making movies like ‘The Wedding Crashers”. The movie made a lot of money, and was hilarious to watch, but you’re not really pushing the medium forward, it’s not the type of thing people will write about for years to come. If you want high art, you’re going to have to have solid writing. John Carmack once said that story in a video game is like story in porn, it’s expected to be there, but isn’t really important. I think Carmack has done incredible things for the Industry, and he deserves credit for that, but that quote definitely speaks to his games. They’re fun to look at, maybe even fun to play, but they don’t touch you on an emotional level the way something like Ragnar Tornquist’s The Longest Journey does. If we want games to be high art, they have to be more than eye-candy, you have to feel something when you play them, you should be left thinking about them while you’re falling asleep at night…

Anyway, these are all thoughts that popped into my mind while I was listening to the Silicon Knights team talk. I hope that they manage to drive in that direction.