Games For Windows top spokesman (and RPS’ favourite name in the games industry), Kevin Unangst, has been interviewed by Gamasutra’s Brandon Sheffield. In the interview Unangst is careful to talk up the PC, while avoiding the clear and present fact that the humble box will ultimately outmode and obliterate the console toys and become the de facto single format for gaming. Wuh? Crazy talk? Nolan Bushnell is with me. Find out what I’m wittering about after the link.
So here’s the interesting bit:
Okay. I was talking to Nolan Bushnell a little while ago. I was asking him if he ever thought that there could only be a single format for games, and he said he’s pretty sure it would be the PC that would be the de facto single format on which games are released in the distant future. What do you think about that?
KU: That’s interesting. I have a lot of respect for Nolan. I hadn’t heard that he’d said that, so that’s an interesting view of the future. I think that we’re uniquely in both the console business and the PC business, and I think there are certain instances where consumers like playing in their living room for some types of games. I like playing on the biggest screen in the house.
But I think we share the view that the PC will always be at the center of the innovation that is happening for gameplay — new game types, new business models, new distribution models.
It’s lead in the Internet, it’s lead in the acceleration of graphics, and I don’t see any reason to believe that the PC will change, and that trend will go away any time soon. It is at the forefront, and I believe it will continue to be at the forefront.
And who knows, in that vision of the future, everything may be called a PC, right? Everything’s going to get more intelligent and more Internet-connected, and the investments that Microsoft’s making in both of those worlds I think will allow us to bring better experiences to consumers, no matter where they come in. They start on the consoles? We’re going to make sure that when they add a PC to the mix that that experience gets better, and vice versa.
That last paragraph was basically the message I got from the last GDC. (A GDC at which Mr Sheffield told me he never used a PC to play games, except when he did…) The point is that everything is converging on being a PC, from your phone to your Playstation. They all want to be the beige box.
My personal future, for say fifteen years time, sees things like this: a similarly open-ended PC market to today, only there’s several powerful standards and ultra-scalable technologies that everyone is running with. The PC is sat in your office, but is wirelessly tied in to every other screen in the house, from your phone to the TV in the kitchen and the machine renders appropriately for the display device. The household PC is used to browse the Net and check email in your office, but also becomes a kind of central entertainment handler and games TiVo. No need for another box or a pile of discs in your TV parlour: the PC is already handling that, and it’s busy downloading the stuff you might want to play, even if you never do. You’re paying for a couple of different services, one that makes sure you can play the games you’re likely to want to play on your TV as soon as you sit down. Your PC does the actual rendering on one of its many cores, while someone else is web-browsing, and it knows you want to play because you’ve picked up a gamepad. At the same time, it also makes sure that you can play other games sat at your desk with a mouse and keyboard: those Total War games you like, or the mouse and keyboard versions of the episodic shooters you’ve been playing through, or those dojin games you keep blogging about.
When I suggest this future people generally dismiss it as a 1950s-style technofuture dream: one box fits all? Never! But it’s not quite like that. One box scales to all. If we’re getting to a stage where that console under the TV can be used to check your email or browse the web, why not simply set things up the other way around? Why would you spend $1000 on a PC and $500 on a console if you could spend $1000 on something than ran all aspects of your home entertainment? I think the only reason it hasn’t happened yet is that media-centre type PCs are a bugger to set up, and don’t have the pluggable convenience of consoles. As more and more people find themselves playing via the internet, making the most of their PC, and using what Koster calls “the true next generation console,” ie Abobe Flash, that will change.
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Kevin Unangst’s answer is basically saying “you’re probably right, but we would like to keep selling proprietary games consoles as well if it’s all the same to you”.
I think the platform(s) that a game runs on locally is getting less and less important as hardware becomes more commoditised. What ultimately matters is that games speak a lingua franca online so that communities aren’t dictated by hardware.
Microsoft’s vision of this is that all the clients are locked to Microsoft-originated platforms (Xbox 360, Zune, Vista), which is why whatever they come up with will ultimately fail, unless they have a major rethink.
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I also think that the Eee PC (and that class of devices) is going to have a massive effect on games, particularly in that space that encompasses LAN parties and single-screen ‘party’ games. It would be interesting to see a PC game that could ’spawn’ a non-graphics-intensive client onto a bootable MMC card. Kind of like Nintendo DS network gaming on steroids.
For comparison of gaming ability, by the way, dedicated Eee PC owners have tried getting various games working. It turns out that anything made before about 2001ish is perfectly fine on it – which means that, as long as you don’t care about eyecandy, there’s no reason why it can’t be a viable gaming platform… (hey, even if you do care about eyecandy – Quake III runs on it fine…)
15 years a head with the current speed of technological progress is a hard thing to predict, esp with things hotting up in the ME as they are. Convergence is a wonderful word, full of whimsy, but the notion of a natural end point doesn’t quite do it for box sellers like Apple, Sony, HP or any of the rest who have quarterly returns to make. Albeit we might reach a point of ‘all in ones’, there will always be a need for newer ‘better’ models to continue oiling the relentless wheels of capitalism.
Does all of this mean there are sects within Microsoft, specifically the Xbox sect and the Games For Windows sect?
Will they be fighting eachother in bloody cultural wars?
Will those wars be simulated in an RTS (WindowPane), to be produced by the winning sect?
If Microsoft would just add a special account type to Windows that’s strictly meant to run games: where all non-essential services, drivers, and other applications, were not active or taking up memory, and also came down hard on companies that write poor device drivers which are responsible for much of the instability people have (e.g. early nVidia Vista drivers), it would elminate much of the headaches for everyone involved. The game developers and publishers, the hardware manufacturers, and the end users.
As for the article itself: I also still believe that the PC will come out on top, eventually. But the console manufacturers and game publishers are too obsessed about absolute control over the end-user experience right now, to easily let go of their current locked-down, proprietary boxes. In fact, nothing would make them happier than everybody having a dumb terminal with no “brain”; that just delivers the content from a centralized server, which they have absolute control over. Which would be a step backwards in the evolution of computing technology, if allowed to happen.
Agreed, but I would extend that further: content providers would love for DVRs, portable media players, and computers to all require internet access so content can be “verified,” thereby relegating us to the status of content renters.
I’m dismayed by how Microsoft treats PC gamers like shit. Next to enterprise users and sadists, we’re probably their most dedicated “fans”; despite its many flaws, Windows is still the best OS for gaming. But any effort to develop a special Windows account for gaming, I fear, would turn into a “console” partition that would be rife with “trusted computing” measures to facilitate DRM, etc. I’m all for standardization, it’s just that I fear the players involve would standardize the experience for their benefit and not the benefit of the user.
Its all changing, desktop PC’s will be relegated to pro, business and the public sector. The majority appear to want a different kind of device for the typical PC needs, something simpler, instant on and instant recovery with a simpler interface and finger snap fast. Basicaly the design philosophy behind the mobile phone or any other electronic device that isn’t a PC. For example mobile phones which becoming more filinctional as a web device and remain simple, the success of the iPhone
for web browsing conversly web use has never taken off in front of tv just isn’t convenient enough.
With all that in mind there will be much less of a market so less will be developed on. What I think and hope will happen is that the PC will once again become a niche again and i hope be just like the old days. The other third of this pie is that people like microsoft are only on the console business to get a box in the living room and so it will be moving more and more to the media functionality and casual gaming, even apple are trying with tv appletv which is now going to have casual gaming presence. Also the only open platform I see advancing is one for MID’s and Mobile Phones.
I could go into much more detail but I’m sure everyone switched off after ‘the’ don’t worry the rest was just filler so inappear intelligent while I sit next to my collection of leatherbound books..
Hello to all, my first post. Finally a gaming site which isn’t staffed with peoples whose first gaming experience wasn’t a bloody playstation.
PS: typing this on an iPod touch whilst on the bog, I’d probably electrocute or strangle if I tried bring a desktop in hear. Plus the
Kettle & Toaster wouldn’t like it.
Apologies for the many typos and poor grammar, the comment system is failing to save changes.
I agree with the laptops being the future. As a student everybody has laptops, I had one till recently but got sick of moving a desktop up and down the country, and up and down stairs.
Got a nice big laptop, 17′, now, does everything I want games wise, and is still portable enough to take to the sitting room and game there, so is more fun and sociable.
With more and more people house sharing and loads of students laptops are big sellers, and have come a long way since a few years back.
I’ll never give up my desktop. I’ve a full tower case, and until I can upgrade and/or take apart a laptop as easily as I can a desktop box, I’ll keep a tower. I also use a shuttle box in the living room as a media server, and I think that’s the way people will go – I know a fair few people who’ve done it. Instead of one box to do everything, people might have two or three PCs – one for gaming, one for media, one for office or whatever. And with that will hopefully come customised operating systems optimised for each system – I hate having to stop/start half a dozen processes on my gaming PC depending on what I have to do. Or even reboot.
From what I see around…if somebody buys PC it’s a laptop, and one with integrated Intel gfx. Gaming desktops are almost statistatically insignifant anomaly.
And…I actually think that there isn’t anything bad if we end up with “standard”, not very fast gfx which gaming companies will have to take into account when outlining system requirements…
Or a cheap Radeon graphics solution.
In-order processing alone ruins any love I’d have for consoles.
Not to mention just how much I can do on a PC, such as say posting here, then downloading an indie game, then playing an MMO, while I browse youtube, etc etc. Consoles almost always make you do one thing at a time. Multitasking has, and will always be better on a PC.
Not to mention that fact that, while PC’s will always have the problem of “can I run ‘x’”, there’s a reason that happens – PC’s are ahead of consoles in every single way. Graphics, sound (at least, usually), A.I., CONTROL (mouse beats every type of controller I’ve used) etc. PC gamers claim games on both platforms are ‘dumbed down’ for console gaming, and that’s almost universally true.
Anyone remember shadowrun ‘balancing’ Console vs. PC gamers? Jesus, all they did was remove most of what you could do on a PC, and ‘assist’ console gamers with auto-aim, etc.
I think the convergence will be in the middle. Gaming PC’s that will be designed by others that we will have to buy as they will be the only PC’s that will play the PC games, and at the same time consoles becoming those same PC’s with a fixed architecture.
After all, with 95% of PC games now console conversions, we are mostly playing ‘console games’ on our PC. Also, step back and think what Megadrive players would have called a box with a hard drive and internet access and downloading of patches, etc. I think they would have said you were describing a PC.
So something in the middle, that I worry may please nobody. For example, most people don’t see it this way, but 5 million DOSBox downloads in the last 5 years is surely an indictment on modern PC gaming. With the recent success of GOG.com and the growth in the ebay PC retro section and the number of retro PC titles STEAM and D2D now carry all point to a disappointment in these dumbed down console conversions we get so often now.