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The biggest hindrance in the country where I live is licensing agreements. Companies buy exclusive rights to popular content, limit it to their restrictive and

The biggest hindrance in the country where I live is licensing agreements. Companies buy exclusive rights to popular content, limit it to their restrictive and expensive platform/service. This license will often last from 6 months to a year. I'm tired of getting the, "this content is not available in your region" because its either unlicensed or been elusively licensed. I understand the benefits of exclusivity in distinguishing products, but rather than 6-12 months (or sometimes more), it should be more like 2 weeks, or a month. Unlike exclusivity on xbox/ps4/pc, where the content is specifically designed for those platforms, there is no technical reason for exclusivity for media content. Half the time the rights holders don't even license some content for my country until a few weeks to months later. Occasionally, not at all. They could license it on netflix for my country, or other similar service, but refuse to do so. Yet this is in spite of netflix having a license for the same content in the US, or other regions. With the internet, regional licensing just makes no sense for digital goods. A service like netflix should be able to obtain a license for content and distribute it to whom ever they want to, where ever they are. The only barriers to this are artificial. So while the future may be rushing forward, in many ways, we are partially stuck in the past, held back by archaic and antiquated systems of past generations that are unable to let go. Its a matter of perspective. For some the future isn't coming soon enough, for others its rushing by.

jim-greer 11y ago
Agreed! But it's perverse to blame Netflix for any of this, as OP and others seem to.
sievebrain 11y ago
Content is rarely/never designed specifically for a games console. Game engines are always mostly portable and the porting costs are quite low. Video game exclusivity, when it happens, is nearly always a business decision to try and boost the popularity of the platform. The main problem is that the big audiences are still on the older platforms, not Netflix or equivalents (and if all audiences moved from older providers which are at least competing, to Netflix, would that really be better? Or just replacing the devil you know with the devil you don't?)
- cableshaft 11y ago
  Speaking as someone who has ported games to other platforms before, it's not as easy as you say. There's almost always platform-specific issues to deal with. It's rarely as easy as "Export -> to Xbox" (although Unity tries real hard to do this, it took us several months to convert one of our games from PC to iOS). Differences in input, resolution, screen sizes, and RAM often become hurdles that take real time and manpower to overcome, and can be insurmountable, depending on how the game is structured. The companies might have legitimate concerns over whether their time is better spent on porting to new platforms, or spent working on the next title. That's why you see so many third parties handle the ports, so the core team can move on to new projects.

jim-greer 11y ago

Agreed! But it's perverse to blame Netflix for any of this, as OP and others seem to.

sievebrain 11y ago

Content is rarely/never designed specifically for a games console. Game engines are always mostly portable and the porting costs are quite low. Video game exclusivity, when it happens, is nearly always a business decision to try and boost the popularity of the platform. The main problem is that the big audiences are still on the older platforms, not Netflix or equivalents (and if all audiences moved from older providers which are at least competing, to Netflix, would that really be better? Or just replacing the devil you know with the devil you don't?)

cableshaft 11y ago
Speaking as someone who has ported games to other platforms before, it's not as easy as you say. There's almost always platform-specific issues to deal with. It's rarely as easy as "Export -> to Xbox" (although Unity tries real hard to do this, it took us several months to convert one of our games from PC to iOS). Differences in input, resolution, screen sizes, and RAM often become hurdles that take real time and manpower to overcome, and can be insurmountable, depending on how the game is structured. The companies might have legitimate concerns over whether their time is better spent on porting to new platforms, or spent working on the next title. That's why you see so many third parties handle the ports, so the core team can move on to new projects.