Thoughts on Consoles and Certification Processes - Jonathan Blow

The problem is most games on these systems are terrible, and often either don't have a demo, and want to ckle and dime me to be able to make progress through the game.

On the other hand, while I might not like all the games on the Xbox online store, I find them to be of reasonable quality, have demos, and never require me to pay to make progress through the standard game.

I have found several friends have had a similar experience. Perhaps we are just dinosaurs, but I wonder if games on mobile are going to crash (or have already crashed, how many are selling any kinds of numbers? obviously some do well).

I've taken many games through MS, Nintendo and Sony certification and while the rules seems bizarre and arbitrary they are not that hard to take in to account when you start designing a game. Once the console hits the street they rarely change.

I've failed many times in technicalities that were annoying but at the same time they've found real issues with the titles that made it a better game.

Although it does 'waste' developer time it smooths the user experience in to a sort of homogenised consistent experience so users of ALL ages know what to expect on a platform saving them time.

For example implementing a clever save game system sounds like it makes sense but most users will not understand why when they save and turned off the console their save game was lost. If they are consistently told DONT TURN THE THING OFF WHEN SAVING they get a consistent experience that THEY control. It's not the best technical solution but it's the best real world solution. Remember a LOT of people turn of their console at the mains! There is no distinction between shutdown and turn off in their mind. These are mass consumer devices and need to act like toasters and high end PCs at the same time.

The QA people in S,N and MS really do user test this stuff. Most console players are so technically illiterate it's shocking they are allowed to drive a car.

I'm now an indie dev and if I'd only been an indie dev I would probably feel like the author (I'm not sure of their history). Having been at the 'pro' or 'mass market' end of the industry I have a lot of sympathy and respect for the manufacturers TRCs.

Do games consoles not implement some kind of transactional system for game saves anyway? It would seem very harsh to lose all progress in a game because of a power cut! Especially since modern games don't seem to have any way to allow the player to make multiple arbitrary save files as backups.

Makes me nostalgic for the days of "you will know that the game is saving because your PC will be completely unresponsive for 10 seconds".

- Backward compatibility. For example it was not allowed on PSX to use certain tricks to draw the triangles faster, as future emulators would've had problems with that.

- Save systems. Made for not yet smart kids, not so smart parents. The save system has to be robust, so much that it has to write exactly how many blocks it's gonna write - you are buying a memory card, you need to know how much is going in there.

- DVD/CD-ROM/BluRay speeds. You can't just stream tons of things and expect to work. You also need to consider where/how your data is, and how you react to I/O errors - it's different per consoles. Also how you handle multiple disk games.

- No frame rate hitching (yes, more allowable nowadays), but in the past - severe frame hitches would've made your certification not possible. After all, on all consoles ever released the code is running in ring 0 - the game code runs along with whatever is there that serves as a kernel. And there is reason for that - maximum hardware explotation (which also takes years to learn)

- Security - just think about this - how easy is to steal non-console game data. It's much harder on the consoles. Yes people eventually break them. But nothing is easier than unzipping .IPA iphone file.

- Size of the games. Really - As much as I love my new Nexus 7, my dear iPad, by humble TouchPad, and my fancy PlayBook - there has been none AAA games shipped there. Infinity Blade is very close, but not AAA (too short).

- The biggest game for mobiles have not yet reached 1GB, while console games have been shipping sometimes 10GB of data, for older consoles.

- Why this is important? - You can QA an indie game much faster, and easier (check progression breaks), than AAA title.

- Multiplayer, scoreboards, etc. - This is where the life of the new console experience is. Cheating here is the plague, and makes players go away. Certification is there to help, but not isolate problems.

- And most of all - no audio hitching (yes, unlike many modern PC games).

- Let's not forget - localization, safety zones (no swastika in German), etc. French correctly hyphenated, etc.

There are many fine details, that would bring an indie title into AAA. Most obvious is content, but overall stability, much less perceived bugs (It's possible that AAA game ships with much more bugs than indie, but then again it's played by much more people/hours).

TRC's are good. They save in long term both the publisher, and the console manifacturer.