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.