Say I'm Sony. I could have a locked platform, sign up some content shops to make a very small number of titles, and sell a few consoles. Or I could make an unlocked platform, reap all the benefits of the locked one, _plus_ encourage a large community of people making all sorts of new things for it, sharing, and spurring many more console sales.
So why lock when you could instead have an ecology?
Nintendo then introduced the concept of locked down consoles as a way to control game quality.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-the-g...
More likely consoles are locked down because:
1. Exploits may allow cheats in games, most worrying for multiplayer titles.
2. Exploits may allow unfair unlocking of achievements, which add to overall "gamer rank" systems.
3. Locking down the ecosystem ensures you pay the console tax to get your game on the system.
4. Locking down the ecosystem prevents game piracy, which is one of the very few advantages consoles have over PCs.
Edit: A surprising number of downvotes for claiming console makers care more about money than they do about their customers. Need I remind you that one of the only titles available for the PS4 on launch was a $50 port of Angry Birds?
Valve's anti-cheat seems to be merely OK and may have a false positive problem.
> Sid Meier in 2008 cited the Seal of Quality as one of the three most important innovations in videogame history, as it helped set a standard for game quality that protected consumers from shovelware.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Seal_of_Quality
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovelware#Shovelware_video_ga...
However you are correct, they did lock down future consoles with the intention of increasing quality of published games. The flipside is that Nintendo has few third-party AAA titles and the majority of their game hits are first-party Nintendo franchises. Nintendo commands a loyal fanbase though, which is hard to come by (especially since it spans multiple generations now).
Really makes me shiver :S
The effect of shitty shovelware is a little hard to describe when even the best games of the time are a blocky mess and can support only a handful of game mechanics before running out of space in the cart. The Atari 2600 was insanely limited and even relatively simple games like Space Invaders required near god level hacks to implement.
If your competitor costs $400 and you cost $500, you're gonna lose a lot of potential sales. When Xbox was initially $500, they ended up unbundling the camera and dropping the price to $400 because they were losing against the $400 PlayStation.
We're $100 cheaper.
Why was the cheering a surprise? It's classic showmanship. And they could afford to do it because they weren't bundling the controversial kinect.
If you don't want AAA games, well all the major consoles have digital games a la Steam that cost less.
fail0verflow's talk[1] at 27C3 on jailbreaking the PS3 is really fun, and they discuss this in detail.
(also: as discussed about 35min into [1], using the same nonce for the ECDSA signature of every game? So the keys can be derived from two games, without knowing most of the curve parameters? What was Sony thinking?!)
- DRM. This prevents piracy, as others here have pointed out. This aims to prevent unauthorized copies, but it also gives them control over primary markets, and over payment systems.
- Quality. Locking allows them to review and approve content before publication. It raises the overall quality of the ecosystem, and reduces shovel ware and bad actors. This is good for publishers, because it increases safety and consumer confidence. This happens to be good for consumers too, because you get less crappy, less crashy software. (This doesn't meant you don't get crap... It just means that overall there's less crap.)
- Control. A locked ecosystem controls many aspects of the second hand market, even more so as downloading takes over hard copy. It has in the past also allowed publishers to have proprietary advantages.
- Ratings. They review content for age appropriateness. It could be self reviewed like the Google play store, but they prefer to be certain. Especially important for Nintendo.
Anyway, they would not be able to reap all the benefits if it were open, and they're in charge, so I guess it won't happen soon. I slightly disagree with the premise that locked vs ecology is the dichotomy. The locked systems do have ecologies, they're just probably different than the one you want, and unfortunately they shut out us makers and experimenters, relative to the platform itself, so they are ecologies of pure consumers.
I'm hoping this is the last generation of dedicated gaming consoles from the big three. I think the time of that idea has passed. At one point, dedicated graphics and sound hardware on consoles gave better performance and quality than you could get on an equivalent PC, but those days are long over. I'm getting a little sick of gimped PC games, that are held back by console limitations. I could get a RaspPi and have enough power to play a surprising number of games.
I've got a Steam Link and a length of ethernet cable that almost cost more to tie into the switch at my desktop, so I certainly won't ever be buying a gaming console.
Only after 1983's crash.
"PC gamers don't understand the purchasing habits of the console market. Your typical console every-man is buying <6 titles a year. All at full price. All on day one. From a brick and mortar store. They don't care about shopping around, they don't care about sales, they don't care about indies, and they don't care about PC exclusives. They're not going to build their own PC. They're not going to troubleshoot or mess with settings. They don't care about mods. They're not going to research shit.
For that motherfucker, of which there are millions, there is no cost benefit to moving to PC gaming.
You're all imposing your own habits on the mass market - which is what the OP was talking about - and wondering why everyone doesn't see things the way you do. You are not the mass market.
Nevermind the irony of the same people who complain that AAA publishers either outright ignore and put no effort into PC gaming while bragging about buying their products on launch day for fractions of their full price."
[1] http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1156919
Personally, I work at a games company, making games(for both consoles and PC). I have literally every gaming system at home, and a really powerful PC. And in my humble opinion - consoles are the way to go. Take Witcher 3 - both me and my significant other were playing it at the same time. Me on PC, while she played on PS4. She was a good 5-6 hours into the game, while I was still fucking around with my drivers, overclocking the GPU and CPU, going into bios every 5 minutes just to make sure I definitely have a locked 60fps experience. Did I get it in the end? I did. Was it worth it? No. Any new game I would rather get on a console and not have to worry if my experience on PC will be good or not. Obviously for you(or anyone else) it might be worth it, I would never try to convince anyone otherwise - play on what you really like.
I've never has this issue when playing games on PC? Usually I can just buy a game, wait for the thing to download and get on with playing it within 10 minutes of it being installed. Usually I change a few settings such as resolution and I put it in windowed mode, and maybe reduce some graphics settings, but that's it. I very rarely have to mess with drivers, and I've certainly never had to overclock my CPU or GPU, nor did I have to enter the BIOS just to play a game. And if the game isn't at 60 fps? Who gives a shit, as long as it's a playable 30 fps or more then I'm happy just playing the game. PC gaming for me isn't about the superior graphics or framerate, it's the fact that I can have a game on one monitor whilst having easy access to a web browser or IRC on another so I can do something during loading screens. It's the fact that I can mod the game to add new features, especially in strategy or management games.
That's literally my experience recently. I also bought Batman Arkham knight on PC(which was famously broken on that platform) and ended up installing it on a seperate SSD just to make it run smoothly, and actually spent quite a while looking at trace statements and driver forums trying to make that game run in an acceptable way. Meanwhile, everyone who had it on PS4 just played it. But again, I'm not trying to say that consoles are any better. I'm saying that they have a place on the market and to think they will disappear is a bit foolish.
My frame rates are Fine, Just Fine for all the AAA titles... Not always 60fps but good enough. But the fact that I can't tweak anything in the bios, there's only one good driver, and I definitely can't overclock makes it feel more like a console in that regard. And I can just concentrate on playing games.
(Apple took a while to come out with Windows 10 drivers though, but that was my only negative experience.)
For example marvel at the self-entitlement of people for getting free stuff while not giving a shit about publishers and note that this happens on Hacker News, so what can you expect from the public at large: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729068
At least the user review process on Steam seems to penalize the garbage pretty effectively.
Now that they've been running the Greenlight program for a while, I've found that the number of games I actually buy on steam has gone way way down. There's just too much crap to shovel through; if a game is worth buying, I'll probably hear about it through some other channel, instead of by finding it on steam, and go to pick it up. Even during the sales events, I don't bother doing anything besides looking at what the 12 to 24 daily specials are, and I'll rarely buy them now.
On the other hand, I'm starting to appreciate games where the primary complaint was "it was too short". There's something to be said for one of those 2 hour walking simulators as a palette cleanser.
Steam with XBOX controller is mighty fine combo, especially since the gaming industry has been in creative stupor the last decade when it comes to AAA
Some developers are only developing for DirectX only. Even some developers who, have in the past (Blizzard) supported Macs, have forgone this in their latest product (Overwatch) because of the additional hassle in doing so.
(Overwatch, unfortunately, seems to be one of the few that doesn't work at all under wine)
Developers are more inclined to develop for PC, because more people use Windows. More people use Windows, because there is a greater number of games in comparison to other platforms.
It sucks, but thats what it is.