Unfettered Blather

I made a prediction back in December that PC gaming as we know it would end. The new OnLive service seems to support my vision of the future.

What I haven’t seen yet is the real potential of a service like OnLive, but when people talk about “A new way to play games on the PC” they’re thinking too small. If all the heavy lifting is done on a server somewhere, why would this be limited to a PC?

Let’s get a few things out of the way, I’m well aware of the technical limitations right now. At some point in the future someone is going to figure this out and make it work. Maybe it won’t be OnLive, but this is a direction the industry has been looking at for awhile. OnLive is possibly just the first to really make a go. We already have browser gaming thanks to GameTap, so the ability to deliver content through a browser is possible and happens already. What OnLive introduces is more reliance on the server side and a true thin client. Honestly, lots of non-gaming applications already do this. The question now is “when” not “if” they can get it to work.

When OnLive, or whatever, finally becomes available there is nothing that says you will actually need a PC to make it work. They might be saying it now, but all you really need is enough processor to handle the content and rendering graphics. A console with the ability to interact with OnLive could do this, a blackberry hooked up to a monitor and keyboard like I suggested in my original article could do it if it had the rendering capabilities, older PC’s in need of an upgrade suddenly become viable. The possibilities are endless.

Not only that, but it’s not really a bold and daring idea. On demand content is already becoming commonplace with movies. This fits the general public’s expectations just fine. The only thing holding all this back is that the infrastructure may just not be ready to handle this kind of service on a massive scale.

I gave up on PC gaming some years back. I won’t go into details why but consoles have been my primary focus for gaming since 2003. I play the occassional PC game but it has been more of a novelty.

Every now and again the PC grognards will rally together and insist that the PC will once again dominate the market. Reasons like having the biggest install base, the ease of development, etc. etc. We’re all very familiar with the laundry list. Yet despite all these advantages, the people who actually publish PC games not only continue to fail to learn from their mistakes but insist on making new ones. It is not that I do not believe in the PC as a platform, I simply lost all faith in the people who are creating content for it to do so effectively.

The other assertion is that services like Steam will help a resurgence in PC gaming, but the problem no one seems to have bothered to notice is that Steam is still not that well known and entirely dependent on consumers having prior knowledge of Steam. Steam faces a real chicken and egg problem. If your product only exists on-line, how do people find out about it? The Internet still exists as a vast and nigh impenetrable sewer of content and the rare diamonds like Valve, who own Steam, have trouble getting their message out to the masses. There is a very good reason Valve still sells retail boxed copies and have ported over most of their games to consoles.

However, even if you get the retail brick and mortar stores back and get publishers to stop making lame-brained decisions, the real problem is that the PC is not going to be a viable platform for much longer.

Let me be clear, the PC as a platform is going away.

When was the last time you booted up your mainframe to run a program someone had written for you in assembler. How many people wouldn’t even understand what I just said? Today’s PC desktop is going to quickly go the way of yesterday’s mainframe computer. Even laptops are going to be considered large and clunky. The contemporary blackberry or equivalent device does many of the functions that people use an office PC for and does them just as well. We already have docking stations for laptops so what is preventing someone from being able to hook up their blackberry to something similar and having access to a full size monitor, keyboard, and mouse. That set-up would easily allow the average office worker to do the exact same tasks on a piece of hardware that fits in their pocket. The iPhone, despite all its flaws, allows someone to surf the web just fine. These devices are not powerful and not designed for the game experiences we are used to. Sure, games will exist for these devices. Show me an extensible electronic device that someone hasn’t figured out how to turn into a toy. Even early GPS devices had a type of game developed for them. Not software, but people found a way to “play” with them. That is not the point, the blackberries and iPhones are not designed first and foremost as game platforms. You might be able to squeeze something equivalent to the DS or PSP into them, but that will be the extent of it.

So where will we get our games from? Consoles? No, in the long run the market will tire of the current multi-platform mayhem. I’m not bemoaning the current state, I’ve long held that the three way competition has been beneficial to gamers but eventually someone is going to emerge dominant, and from there we’ll just integrate the winning concepts into some other device. What we need is a gaming standard, and that hasn’t emerged yet but it will. Video games are a huge market and unlikely to go anywhere, but how we play videogames today will be quite different. Say what you will about the Wii, but compare it to the Atari 2600 and it is indeed one high-tech piece of gear. Inconceivable back in the 80’s.

Specifically though, how would PC gaming make a comeback when the PC platform is shrinking? The very concept of the personal computer is now obsolescent and will likely be obsolete in five to ten years. From a long term business perspective it is a bad investment. The time for the resurgence was ten years ago, now there may not even be ten years left.

Way back when the murmurs of “next-gen” started to surface I predicted that Microsoft’s console would be the winner. At the time I was discounting that Nintendo really had any new ideas and Sony was going to have a hard time catching up since Microsoft seemed poised to release a new console much quicker than everyone else. All of those reasons plus the X-Box was just a superior piece of hardware compared to the Gamecube and PS2. Obviously I underestimated Nintendo and the Wii has gone on to be a huge hit. However, one odd thing has happened that I would never have predicted. Even though I said the “X-Box 2″ would be the top seller in the next (current) generation I figured it would be on US and European sales alone. If you had told me the X-Box 360 would outsell the PS3 in Japan for any length of time I would have accused you of being drunk, at the very least.

While Bill Harris always has excellent commentary on the console market he is either understating or unaware of the significance of Microsoft beating Sony even by one month. Either Microsoft has done something very right (unlikely in light of their quality issues) or Sony has done something very wrong. What happened to “The PS3 will be so great that people will work a second job to get one”? Ok, fine, we all knew that was bunk when Kutagari first said it. Even so, the PS3 has failed to distinguish itself. Blu-Ray, while very pretty, is facing competition from the older DVD format and from digital downloads. Game quality is roughly the same. Anyone who thinks they see a difference in graphical quality that justifies the $100 price difference in hardware has superhuman eyesight.

What made the PS2 worth owning even after the X-Box came out was the game library. The PS2 game library was HUGE, FIERCE, and INTIMIDATING. If you couldn’t find a game you liked on the PS2 you just weren’t trying. As much as I preferred playing third-party games on the X-Box, the PS2 simply had too many exclusives to ignore. The PS3, on the other hand, has a handful of exclusive titles and none of them have been really considered a “Killer App”. This might be a tough distinction to have though considering the PS3’s pricing handicap. However, many of the PS3 exclusives seemed to be victims of their own hype and games like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Heavenly Sword have not had the legs that many predicted. From a game library perspective, the X-Box 360 is a huge win for a gamer, featuring many titles that are not available on the Wii and PS3 while having the best multi-player support for third-party games.

So this begs the question, what is driving the superior sales of the 360 in Japan? The superior game selection, the perception of more “must haves” for the system, the pricing difference, the exclusive titles, or the superior multi-player? I do realize these are not mutually exclusive characteristics. I’m not trying to oversell the 360 here, the PS3 has it’s own unique qualities, but they don’t seem to be selling the console. I’ve heard and read many people say the PS3 is a failure. I’m still not so sure, but it certainly does seem to be doing poorly. I think if anything, this reinforces my opinion that trying to focus on it’s Blu-Ray capabilities and making the format war a priority was a huge mistake that Sony continues (literally) to pay for.

Apparently the price point of $15 for the X-Box Live Arcade game Braid is so controversial that the creater is defending the price over at 1up. Considering the game is selling quite well I’m not sure what there is to defend. Nerd rage is the most impotent kind of protest. Keep in mind this is the same crowd that protests everything that Lucas does while consuming everything with his name attached to it. I would humbly submit that if you complain about the price of Braid but then buy it anyway your protest is going to fall on deaf ears.

Frankly, I paid the $20 for the Penny Arcade game and while I was disappointed with it I still felt that was a fair price. I balk at the $60 release price of X-Box 360 games, but in that case I only buy a handful of titles at launch. In the 40+ games I have purchased for the 360 this year I may have paid full price once. I believe in putting my money where my mouth is.

The Wii is another good example of this. There are still people who say a Nintendo console selling for $250 is too high, yet Nintendo has not had any problems moving a Wii for that price yet.

I don’t know what they teach in high school these days, but I had to take basic economics back in the early 90’s and I am very familiar with the concept of supply and demand. Games that don’t sell well go down in price quickly. If the supply is greater than the demand then either the price can go down or inventory can sit on the shelves. Just look at the bargain bins of your local Gamestop if you’re not comprehending this concept.

If you think $15 is an unfair price for Braid, then don’t buy it. If you paid the $15 anyway and complain, what you’ve really stated is that you’re not happy with the price but you still thought the game was worth the money. Frankly, I wonder what people are thinking anyway. The people who create these games need to recoup costs and there seems to be some kind of assumption that all games go through the same development process and thus cost the same to make. We’re asking developers to charge the same amount as a 20 year old arcade title that has had a minor revamp regardless of their actual costs and development times. We want great games and new ideas but we don’t want to pay anyone to create them for us?

Let me put it simply. I consider most of the offerings in X-Box Live Arcade to be a swirling cesspool of mediocrity at best. I would be more than happy to pay the extra $5 on top of the widely accepted $10 charge for some decent games. You can complain about a $15 game but you’re doing it while playing a console that costs $350 that routinely releases games at $10 more than we were paying just a year ago. $15 for a decent game is a bargain.

I always said that if I got into management I would not do certain things. One of those activities was status reports. Why? Because I hate them.

Basically, if I’m going to do a real status report, one that actually means something, I’m going to spend at least an hour compiling it. That is assuming I haven’t been updating status all week, which would probably add up to an hour of effort anyway. Then the manager, project manager, technical lead, or whoever has to take my status report, read it, and compile it into some other kind of report. Let’s assume that effort is maybe another 15 minutes of effort per employee on their part. Possibly more. This is not counting time spent hounding employees for status, tracking down people who never get around to it (Hello, Boss!), or revising reports that were missing information.

Hey, I respect that managers have to manage and doing so without information is a bear. I’m not unsympathetic, but is this really efficient?

One of the best managers I ever had just did weekly meetings. He would bring a project plan or spreadsheet with him that had everyone’s known tasks on it. Then he would go around the room and get a quick update. Any issues would be talked about outside the meeting. This allowed him to not only get everyone’s status at once, but this was a good time to bring up issues so that he could address them quickly. Even though this was a fair size team, about a dozen people, these meetings could be done easily in half-an-hour. Realistically though you plan to lose an hour of time.

I’ve tried this approach on a team of a similar size and by scheduling a known meeting time every week then no one loses more than an hour of their time for status. I keep track of everything myself and it takes me maybe an hour, tops, to update every week. There is no hounding, missing status reports, or incomplete information. Getting status reports does not become a job unto itself and creating status reports does not become an additional task for employees. I admit, it’s not a perfect system. People get sick or go on vacation, and then I have to put in some extra effort, but really not that much.

The cynical side of me wonders if some past managers didn’t insist on status reports because it helped them do less face-to-face management while also generating work for themselves. After all, if I had to spend 4 hours compiling status reports every week I could look busy while maintaining a facade of importance. Maybe I am looking at it wrong, but all I really know is that the last thing I want to do is harass the people who ultimately support me.