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> That's exactly what should change. Why? For people who don't want to deal with the Xbox One/Playstation 4 monocultures, there's PC gaming. It already exists.

by cwyers 12y ago

> That's exactly what should change. Why? For people who don't want to deal with the Xbox One/Playstation 4 monocultures, there's PC gaming. It already exists. The people who choose consoles over PC gaming choose it because it's more convenient. And that convenience derives in large part from the monoculture (or duoculture, I guess). Low-overhead bare metal programming is what enables the relatively long life of most consoles compared to PC gaming, because developers have time to learn how to get the absolute best performance out of a particular hardware configuration. It costs less money up-front in hardware costs, and it's a lot less work to figure out if a game will work on your system or not (almost no work, actually).

shmerl 12y ago
> Why? Because dealing with many APIs is an extra effort and proprietary APIs make games harder to port to other platforms. Of course those who have unlimited resources are free to write games even in assembly for each platform, but most don't have such resources. > And that convenience derives in large part from the monoculture Convenience of users has nothing to do with monoculture. It has something to do with form factor and design of hardware and software interfaces. Monoculture is just a sick method to lock developers into one platform. Convenience of developers on the other hand should not be based on poor competition. That's a dangerous convenience which leads to stagnation. > Low-overhead bare metal programming is what enables the relatively long life of most consoles compared to PC gaming Which is a double sided issue. Longer update cycle makes development simpler but it also limits creativity by artificial technical limits. The update cycle of consoles can be reasonably more frequent.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  > Because dealing with many APIs is an extra effort and proprietary APIs make games harder to port to other platforms. Game engine middleware. No sane people should be using 3D API directly anyway, unless they are writing their own engine or learning 3D programming.

by cwyers 12y ago

shmerl 12y ago

> Why? Because dealing with many APIs is an extra effort and proprietary APIs make games harder to port to other platforms. Of course those who have unlimited resources are free to write games even in assembly for each platform, but most don't have such resources. > And that convenience derives in large part from the monoculture Convenience of users has nothing to do with monoculture. It has something to do with form factor and design of hardware and software interfaces. Monoculture is just a sick method to lock developers into one platform. Convenience of developers on the other hand should not be based on poor competition. That's a dangerous convenience which leads to stagnation. > Low-overhead bare metal programming is what enables the relatively long life of most consoles compared to PC gaming Which is a double sided issue. Longer update cycle makes development simpler but it also limits creativity by artificial technical limits. The update cycle of consoles can be reasonably more frequent.

pjmlp 12y ago
> Because dealing with many APIs is an extra effort and proprietary APIs make games harder to port to other platforms. Game engine middleware. No sane people should be using 3D API directly anyway, unless they are writing their own engine or learning 3D programming.