REBUTTAL TO: Xbox.. The Next RPG System?
REBUTTAL TO: Rebuttal to Xbox.. The Next RPG System?
In the last weeks, we've been treated to first a particularly enthusiastic view of a future that never materialized and the next being a still optimistic view of what lies ahead, despite the failure of that future to materialize. I agree with Doug that Fable really isn't the grander issue when talking about the X-box. It was simply another Peter Molyneux game, overhyped well beyond any sensible chance of producing and bearing all the successes and failures of a game that was appropriately labeled Project Ego initially. Regardless of whether it had materialized or not, it wouldn't have represented the issue of grander importance: Did the X-box ever truly provide something so revolutionary as to have had a chance to devour the market?
I don't believe it ever did. It was evolutionary in a way, but the hard drive never truly had a significant chance to revolutionize the console industry. Both in foresight and in hindsight there are several traits that ensured that it would never have more than a marginal effect on how games were made for consoles. There were several traits that contributed to an environment that ensured it never had a chance, not the least of which being the PC gaming market, the size of the game discs as it stands, and the possible uses of a hard drive in a game in theory.
The console gaming market is used to working without a hard drive. The mentality, optimizations, and design considerations that the vast majority of those currently in the market (and specifically in the market prior to Microsoft's entrance and Sony's hard drive expansion) were those well experienced with planning to manage everything off of external discs with a minimal amount of material saved in a hard format. Those who were particularly used to working otherwise worked on the PC market, which is a vastly different environment to work in then the console gaming market with significantly different considerations in play. Specifically those who are developers that are utilizing hard drives effectively are far more likely to produce their games for the PC directly with a potential customer base far exceeding the entirety of the installed console gaming market with the advantages of significantly more hard drive space to work with and better specs that can generally be relied upon across the board. In other words, Microsoft's hard drive was not a feature that would generally push the system above other console systems on a competitive front for getting developers and instead would more often place it in competition with the more powerful PCs. It was a feature that technically had to be ignored by any development company that wanted to produce their games on more than one gaming platform (excepting the PC and X-box gaming platforms) further weakening the potential for games to be produced for it while raising the cost of the unit itself, thus hurting the X-box competitively in garnering enough of a population to really drive developers to take advantage of it. This is most thoroughly represented by the fact that the vast majority of games that took advantage of it in any way were ports or simultaneous productions from usually superior PC versions.
Additionally, the hard drive space on Microsoft's X-box was 8 gigabytes. Not too shabby a production, reasonably sized and larger than a fair number of computer games even today require. Unfortunately, one must also look at the discs that were run on that machine and it's biggest competition, the Sony Playstation. A single layer DVD would provide about 4.7 gigabytes of storage space. A double layer dvd providing nearly 10 gigabytes. In other words, the information on a single disc (compressed or not) represented far more than the capacity of the hard drive. And that's neglecting the fact that there were very few multi-discs games in this era that would at least provide the technical advantage of allowing game developers to store data on the hard drive to provide extra room for longer and more complicated stuff from the discs. More specifically, if one is going to bundle any data for the hard drive, it has to already be carried on disc. Since there's no ability to cut corners on the number of discs because of this, there's no advantage from the size. Given the relative closeness in the amount of storage space provided simply by the disc itself, the primary advantage therefore would be in speed. The ability to send data from both a hard disc and a dvd, assuming the bus without looking is capable of handling that without being overflowed, would be a definite boon in terms of production capabilities. But, as is historically shown, having the most powerful machine on the market by a small or even large degree is generally no promise of either success or developer penetration. With the fact that this design added a notable cost margin above it's competitors, it's easy to see why Microsoft had difficulty in the market.
Finally, as the hard disc goes, there's a limited range in which they are particularly useful. They can be used to provide a second, possibly faster, data source to utilize at the same time as the disc drive. They can be used to store extra modifiable information (read/write flags) of particularly large quantity. They can be used to handle large sized save information. They can be used to provide storage information for critical data that is necessary for multiple discs that would take large amounts of space on each disc (thus providing an area to slice down on memory usage per disc overall and free room for other things). While each of these things can improve the functionality of the unit, none of them particularly scream a vast amount of possible innovation inherent over other systems without the hard drive. The two unit(disc drive and hard drive) method just screams both overhead and excessive complexity behind designing games on it, not the type of setup to really capture the development heart aside from the standard 'oh, disc has everything and we just page it if the hard drive doesn't have it on it'. Providing a certain amount of space for modifiable information has been a historical constant in consoles since before the Nintendo, with the only variable changing there is how fast it can be written and how much there is to work with. There are few games that can't compress their state information into the hundreds of kilobytes range, much less that need gigabytes worth of space. A hard drive simply cannot compare to the access speed provided by on board ram, reducing it's usable range to only the most pessimistic memory reads. As far as saved games go, this provides a boon to the user, not the developer. The developer is still pushed to produce the minimal compressed save state, and the ability to ignore that does not particularly advantage the design (Aside: Heck, the PS2's save card stores a 3d model, usually with animation, alongside all of the saved variables so those folks certainly aren't hurting for having complicated games without having 8 gigabytes for storing the saved information). I see room for stretching the same muscles that existed before further, but nothing that really breaks any boundaries and lets loose the dogs of innovation, that the hard drive ever represented.
I'm not saying innovative games weren't made on the X-box or that the X-box won't have more of them, but that the environment was hardly as fruitful to grab lots of developers on the competitive traits of the hard drive. While it pulled in the fringe of computer gamers and those curious over the innovations Microsoft would bring, what sold the X-box more than anything else was simply it's network which was vastly superior to anything else and is often referred to as the primary reason to develop for the X-box over the Sony Playstation and the Gamecube, despite its superior hardware specifications.
Secondly, Doug gave a solid analysis of how the game market looked from the critical important position of reaping new talent into Microsoft's stable, but he neglected to analyze an exceedingly critical point in the game market that was different from when Sony entered the market and why Microsoft in specific had more difficulty than others would have entering the market, despite its massive funds.
When one looks at the early PS1 era, one sees a lot of games, both good and bad, produced. Yes, the boundaries for small developers to enter that market was low, perhaps the lowest it's been since the Atari era. Yes, a small number of them became valuable big name properties, but, more importantly to Sony's success there were the big names that were brought out and the fact that it came out ahead of the curve (about 2 years or so I believe). They had Square in their pocket who produced a lot of those graphically pleasing games that marketed well as far as RPGs go. It had Namco, Konami, and Electronics arts. Sure, the small companies filled out the line, but it was the big wigs that gave the system the first push to get it way out in front. Microsoft, meanwhile, entered the scene with the X-box about a year after the PS2 with a more complicated machine, little more than themselves developing for it, and having to compete with a more established company using similar business tactics. Sure, it had an easier programming interface and they did eventually get some big American companies on their side, but it's easy to see why the X-box had to brutally battle it out to even grab a second (by popularity) or distant third(by profits) position.
Aside from that, there's the fact that the X-box had to deal with being made by Microsoft. This put it in a unique category that partially made it's technical specifications, price, and developer backing secondary. Microsoft exists not only as an American company, thus as a foreign rival that is less likely to have the connections with a lot of the large Japanese console game publishers that have been a significant force over the last ten years, but as the largest software company in the world. It's successful in the extreme and for one reason or another, a lot of people don't like it because of that success. Since it was a Microsoft product, it had stigma attached to the actual buying of it compared to the systems it was competing against. There was a huge amount of mocking negative press surrounding it prior to and after it's actual release. I think a fair deal of that stigma exists today in working with it compared to working with Sony's stuff. Though on this, I could easily be wrong.
Microsoft, in other words, is about even at best with the other systems around in having any chance of nifty 'end of life' games being made for it. It has really nothing that pushes it far above in terms of lucrative design, and unlike Sony, which has at least formally come out and promised backwards compatibility, there has been no official statement from Microsoft on that issue other than to say they were still thinking over it.
Anyhow, with all that said, good luck on your developments for the X-box, Doug. I personally haven't invested in it either, but that's more from it simply providing the least interesting unique experiences to me instead of any technological issue or fault with the better games on that system.
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