NXE is here!

After months of work, the magic day has finally arrived.  Many of the features my team has developed are invisible to you, dear reader, but trust that the dark magic they emit fuels the juicy bits now flowing to your console as of 45 minutes ago.

One reasonably high profile feature, and a personal favorite of mine, that you can see is Marketplace on the web, which you can find here.  It’s a million times easier to find games and movies, manage the content you’ve already purchased, and play with your download queue.

Any feedback you guys have on either the new user experience, or especially the web-side stuff is welcome and appreciated!

Changing Countries on Xbox Live

You can’t.

I work for XBox Live, and I can’t do it either. For most people, this is not really an issue: On the whole, most people never stop living in the same country. Nevertheless, the experience is horrendous for those of us who do. For moves across the ocean, this will always be a painful process because of region restrictions on the DVDs that Xbox 360 games come on. There are a plethora of reasons, it turns out, why it’s also tricky to do it on the digital content side. The best you can presently do is the following:

1. Use the Content License Transfer Tool to move all the content associated with your account from Country 1 to the Xbox 360 you’re moving with (or onto your new one, if you’re selling the old and buying a new one when you get there).
2. Create a new account, with a new Billing Address, and a new Passport - all of which should be in Country 2.

Pros:

• You still have access to all the content you bought initially. You don’t need to repurchase anything.

Cons:

• Any time remaining on your Gold subscription is lost.
• You lose your gamerscore and all your achievements.

This is not really a solution, but at least with the content transfer tool you keep anything you paid for. If in the future a work-around becomes possible, I’ll be sure to post it.

Until then, my new American Gamertag is:

Changed from the Canadian:

Turn 10 Studios: Impressions

I meant to post this about 5 months ago, but I’ve had a lot of difficulty coming up with more to say than a strictly emotional impression, nevertheless, I thought I’d punch it out.

In November I was fortunate enough to have some lunch-time conversations with Bill Giese and Korey Krauskopf from Turn 10 studios. While I can’t speak to the specifics of much of the things we talked about, I spent a lot of the time talking to them about what it’s like to work in the studio.

I’ve found that many of the people at Microsoft have a gleam in their eyes, the kind that comes from doing something you love. Turn 10 has this gleam in spades, but moreover they have a tremendous amount of energy.  I’ve never really had the chance before to speak at length with people who have been developing games in full blown professional studios for a large tract of time.  If Turn 10 is my only datapoint, it’s probably a good one.

Turn 10, if you’re not aware, are the developers of the Forza Motorsport series.  This series is essentially Microsoft’s answer to the Grand Turismo series, and they’ve done a pretty amazing job.  Walking around in their studio, you can see why.  Every scrap of wall that isn’t spackled with design plans is brimming with racing gear.  They even have a test setup with full on racing bucket seats.

When Korey and Bill talk about their game, I was struck by how excited they were about it.  I guess on reflection I’ve always seen this happen, in interviews with game developers, even transcripts of those interviews, you can tell from the text how much they love their game.  It’s a spectacular thing to be able to do what you love for a living, and this industry demands it, because that love gets channeled into passion for the game and hopefully into something that will excite gamers just as much.  I think Turn 10 has done a pretty decent job at this so far, and I’m looking forward to their future offerings

If you want the opportunity to talk to Korey, or one of several others at Turn 10, they’re holding a promotion where you can play Forza 2 against them, tomorrow night.  Check it out here.

Interview with Chris Satchell

This is nearly a week old now, but Gamasutra has a great interview with Chris Satchell (General Manager of XNA) on the XBL Community Games.  It’s nice to see that Microsoft does care about pushing the medium in ways that go beyond graphics capabilities.  Good job folks.

A Week in Cuba

As previously mentioned, I went on vacation last week, and apparently the world does not stop while I’m laying on the beach.

Big news of the last week.  Apparently it was GDC or something.  I wasn’t there, so if you want juicy GDC goodness, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Microsoft

• Microsoft, in a new initiative called Dreamspark is making much of its developer software free to students.  This software includes Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server, XNA Game Studio, XNA Creator’s Club Subscription, and Expression Studio.  That should be plenty of tools for would be game developers to muck about in.  Details are here.
• Microsoft is dropping support for HD-DVD with the discontinuation of the add-on for the Xbox 360.  All remaining units are being cleared at firesale for $50.  I would not be surprised if there was a Blu-ray add-on in the future.
• Microsoft announced during the GDC 2008 Keynote a new service, the so-called Xbox Live Community Games.  Under this service, users can build a game using XNA Game Studio, and then upload it directly to a community portal where the game is democratically reviewed.  The reviewing process is intended to look for infringing or objectionable material.  The best of these games get automatically uploaded to Xbox Live for the masses to enjoy.  No specifics on pricing, or if the developer is getting kickbacks (as one would assume they would if Microsoft is collecting on their work).

Sony
On the Sony side of things, Phil Harrison, one of the founding members of Sony Computer Entertainment, and the president of SCE Worldwide Studios, has submitted his resignation.  Changes in leadership often come with widespread changes across the board, but it depends on the size and momentum of the company in question, and Sony is rather largeish, so I would not anticipate a massive change in the direction of their games.

Australia

Australia is talking about finally getting a new rating that will allow more mature titles to be sold there.  Unfortunately, I doubt this will alleviate the massive delays they usually incur before North American/Japanese release, and release to the land down under.

Electronic Arts

EA is offering to buy Take Two!  I would suggest in reaction to the recent Activision/Vivendi merger, EA is looking to add some more meat to its already colossal frame.  EA’s new CEO John Riccitiello has mentioned that he’s extremely unhappy with the scores EA’s games have been getting of late, so there might be some incentive to own some games that are critically acclaimed (which might have fueled the recent acquisition of Bioware as well).  Take Two is brimming with talent, including the developers of the Grand Theft Auto series (Rockstar), Bioshock (2K Games), and Civilization (Firaxis).  While EA’s initial bid is a bit lower than Take Two is looking for, most analysts are expecting this deal to go through eventually at some price point.

On a side note, Take Two is the current owner of one of my favorite IPs of all time, the Tex Murphy series.  This series was created by Access Software (later renamed to Indie Built) in the 90s.  Microsoft acquired them for the Links Golf series, and then sold the company to Take-Two who then shut it down.  While a revival is not likely at EA, it’s marginally more likely than at the parent who shut them down in the first place.

EA has a habit of killing great teams by using simple business math.  If you have everyone using the same tools and processes, costs are lower.  Unfortunately, this slows down and breaks the dynamic that produced the great team in the first place.  This is something you can do with teams that are having trouble realizing their full potential, perhaps due to infrastructural problems, but when you acquire a really solid team, it’s important that you just leave them alone to do their thing.  Riccitiello seems to be aware of this, so perhaps Take Two’s properties are not going to join the legacies of Westwood, Bullfrog, and Origin.

Havok

Havok is free, to which I say, OMGWTFBBQ.  Well, okay, it’s only free on the PC, but as of May 2008, you at home will be able to download your very own copy of Havok Complete (which includes the Physics and Animation packages).  This is a non-commercial license, but it allows hobbyists to get their hands dirty with the most widely used physics engine in the PC gaming space, which is good for companies looking to hire people who know Havok already.  This theoretically lays some groundwork for Havok’s more specialized products for behavioral animation, deformable solids, and cloth rendering.

And that’s all that happened this week, I’ll be posting on a more semi-regular basis now.

Steamworks

Valve has announced a new design platform for PC game design called Steamworks, available free of charge. The suite of tools seems to focus on easing some production-level issues rather than design issues. This includes smoothing delivery of the game through Steam’s retail channel, as well as providing certain frameworks to improve a game so delivered, notably in the multi-player arena.

Most notably in my opinion is the inclusion of hooks for getting play data back from the users once they’ve been launched.  This type of data gathering immensely helps developers get information about how the players are playing their game, and thus to take this data back and use it to improve designs for future titles.

All of this of course depends on the utilization of Steam as the delivery channel, something very few large studios would want to commit exclusively to.  I’ve asked Jason Holtman how well Steamworks would interface with XNA, as these two technologies seem to me to be functionally, if not technically, complementary.  If I hear back from him, I’ll update this page.

More Transparency

This past fall I mentioned that I was off to Microsoft to work in on Visio as a Program Manager.  I had a great time, and learned a lot from the excellent folks over there.  In fact, I liked Microsoft so much, I’ve decided to go back there full time.  At the end of June when I’m finished here at Waterloo, I’ll be packing up and leaving Toronto for the rainy shores of Redmond, Washington.  My new position will be as a Software Development Engineer in Xbox.com.  This will likely expose me to a lot of the new developments Microsoft is planning for the future, which obviously I won’t be able to talk about here.  I will make an effort to post any interesting things from inside Xbox that are safely scrubbed but may not have floated out through other channels, insofar as I am able to do so.

XNA 2.0 Beta Released

Read the press release here.

Exciting things:

• Convert between Windows and Xbox 360 projects
• Build content separately from game code
• Networking Support on Xbox and Windows using Live
• Improved Integration
• Other stuff!

Download it here. Go make games. Dream Build Play is happening again! Go sign-up.

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.

Xbox Dashboard Update

The press release for the Dec. 4th Dashboard update has some cool stuff in it. Major Nelson has released a couple of new tidbits that we’re in the press release.

One of those two features fixes a major longtime problem with Xbox Live, although it’s not expressly stated in the release.

Previously, if you decided to move to another country (I hear people do that sometimes), you were screwed to the nines. The Live Passport framework locks in the country code when the account is created, and that country code cannot be changed. For things like webmail, it doesn’t really matter. The only result is that the advertising that you get is irrelevant to you in your new country.

But because an Xbox Live account is tied to a Live Passport, this has serious repercussions. Firstly, you need to pay for your account with a credit card who’s billing address is in the country your passport is linked to. What this means is that you would need to maintain an active billing address and credit card in your old country, just to be able to continue to pay for the service.

Secondly, you’re locked out of any content you might normally have access to in the new country (e.g. if you move from Canada to the USA, you would normally now have access to Xbox Live Marketplace TV and Movie content, something which is forbidden in the great white north).

The work around in the past has been “Start a new Xbox Live account”. Yeah. That means you lose all your achievements, your gamerscore, and any months of paid access you might have had left on the account. Additionally it means that you can no longer access any games you’ve purchased on XBLA from any machine, only the console you specifically downloaded them on in the first place. If that machine should happened to, oh, I don’t know, fail in some way, you’ve lost the title.

The potent point in my opinion is this. Starting today, you will be able to re-associate your Xbox Live account with a new passport account. The question is does Xbox Live retain a separate copy of the country code, or do they simply follow the pointer to the one used in the Passport account? If it’s the latter, all problems are solved tomorrow, and ye who change countries can rejoice in the streets.

On a related note: Canada (and some of Europe) is movie rentals on Xbox Live Marketplace on Dec. 11th! Yay for being slightly less of a second class citizen.

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