Firefall developer: "Consoles, I believe, are dead"

By Fred Dutton Published 2 May, 2012

Former World of Warcraft lead on why you should welcome a publisher-free F2P future.

The humble home video game console and the traditional publisher-led model that supports it is on its last legs, so says Firefall creator and former World of Warcraft lead Mark Kern, with developer-centric free-to-play titles waiting in the wings to replace them.

Speaking in an interview with Eurogamer earlier this week, the Red 5 Studios CEO argued that the free-to-play model offers developers much more room to flex their creative muscles, rewarding gamers with more innovative gameplay experiences than risk-averse AAA console publishers can hope to offer.

"The model is transitioning away from these big boxed games where you're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a title, to these sorts of games that don't count on the distributor," he told us.

"They don't need the distributor to succeed, so a lot more money goes into the game rather than to marketing and you get to grow organically with your players. And as there's no barrier to entry for players you can start to compete on fun instead of marketing, which is really the area that we as developers should be in.

"We should be competing on the strength of our ideas and the fun of our gameplay, not the IP, or the license behind the title, or the size of the marketing push."

Kern went on to cite both the death of the middle-tier game and big publisher's relentless hire-and-fire cycle as signs that the traditional boxed model is, as he puts it, "broken".

"Look at the symptoms. Look at the fact that there's no middle ground anymore," he posited.

"You're either an indie game or you're a massive AAA, IP-backed sequel with derivative gameplay that's rehashed over and over again as it's the only safe bet you can make when you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

"The failure is that there's no middle ground. All the games in the middle that could have been made but have been squeezed out and we've seen all these independent studios get closed down over the last few years.

"The other troubling symptom is this wave of lay-offs we have after every product launches," he continued.

"People say 'Oh, that's normal, Hollywood does it all the time.' Well, it's not normal. It's a symptom of your business being broken.

"In Hollywood they work on contract - it's very different. They expect only to work from A to B. In games, these big publishers are hiring swathes of people expecting to have jobs long-term but then lay them off at the end of a project because it doesn't quite deliver. This is unsustainable."

As he sees it, this duly paints a depressing picture for the future of home consoles.

"It takes billions of dollars of investment to create a console and then you have to milk it for five to seven years in order to get your money back," he explained.

"I think the model is broken. You keep making these bigger and bigger bets and what that forces you to do is play it safer and safer. And if you play it safer and safer with your gameplay, people will get tired of the crap you're serving. When that happens, they get bored and they will leave. And you haven't fostered any of the middle ground innovation and new ideas that you need to tap into next.

"So something has to change. Consoles, I believe, are dead."

According to Kern, the future lies with mobile and PC, where developers can grow their audience by keeping prices down and focusing on creating new experiences.

"Isn't it ridiculous that you can buy these fantastic games on iPad, but then you get a publisher like Square Enix charging an astronomical price for an old game port? They just don't get it. They don't get that we have to lower the barrier for entry.

"You have to compete on fun as you no longer have a lock on distribution. Big publishers can no longer rely on the fact that they're the only ones that can get distribution for their titles. We have to compete on different things now, and get back to fun and innovation."

When asked whether he believes the three platform holders can turn things around with the next generation of console hardware, Kern offered little cause for optimism, arguing that organisations the size of Microsoft or Sony just aren't nimble enough to effectively move with the times.

"The problem is, even if they're aware of the issues, there's so much inertia that it's really hard to change," he replied.

"I'll go out and say it; even if the heads of these big organisations do get it - which is questionable to begin with - being able to turn on a dime when everybody's salaries and bonuses are vested in the old business models is a very difficult thing to do.

"I think they're at severe risk right now of being trumped by Apple, by Google, by Facebook. Look at indie games. Look at Riot Games and League of Legends. They have more users than World of Warcraft does. That's crazy. And they don't have a publisher.

"Who needs publishers any more? I certainly don't. I couldn't care less about them at this stage."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kern has no plans to bring Firefall to PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, although he revealed that Red 5 did get a version of the game running on consoles a couple of years ago.

"Why would we? I don't see that [platform holders] see how free-to-play can fit into their model and the fact that they're royalty revenue share is not set up to take advantage of these types of games.

"There's no incentive for me to be on console. I'm more interested in getting onto the Mac OS or even iOS in some form. That's what's more interesting to me."

Red 5's bold, bright shooter, neatly touted by Kern as "like 300-player Borderlands", is currently in an ongoing, ever-expanding beta. You can request access over on the official Firefall site.

Rumour: Next-gen Xbox hitting manufacturing stage

Fri, May 04, 2012 | 15:14 BST

IGN‘s rumouring the next-gen Xbox has already hit the manufacturing stage.

Work has started in Austin, Texas at Flextronics, according to a site source. Flextronics is also the same manufacture of the original Xbox and Xbox 360.

We’re going with IGN in that the hardware being worked on now at the company is more to do with assembling debugs for developers rather than retail SKUs.

“Xbox 360 has found new ways to extend its lifecycle like introducing the world to controller-free experiences with Kinect and re-inventing the console with a new dashboard and new entertainment content partnerships,” said Microsoft in a statement.

“We are always thinking about what is next for our platform and how to continue to defy the lifecycle convention. Beyond that we do not comment on rumours or speculation.”

Flextronics declined to comment.

Microsoft has already confirmed it doesn’t intend to show any new next-gen hardware at its E3 press conference a month today.

Unreal Engine 4 Not For Current Platforms (Except Kepler)

11:02 - Wednesday 9 May 2012 by Kevin Parrish - source: Gamasutra

Unreal Engine 4 won't run on current hardware... except for Nvidia's Kepler, that is.

There's nothing like a game engine you can't run. That means the current hardware platform doesn't have what it takes to render the graphical goodness the software has to offer. It also means it's time to invest in new components or, if you're a console junkie, wait for Microsoft and Sony to cough up a new box. That's where we stand with Unreal Engine 4.

"We’ve started a behind-closed-doors showing of the engine to developers; this is part of our very early ramp-up cycle," said Epic CEO Tim Sweeney in an interview on Monday. "We went through this cycle with Unreal Engine 3 starting in 2003 and 2004. At some point, we’ll make public announcements and ramp up to the point where developers are shipping games, but it’s very early right now. We’re aiming very high, and the intended platforms this is aimed at haven’t even been announced."

Later on in the interview, Sweeney was questioned about what Epic wants from the next-generation of consoles that would help make their games better. His answer same in two parts: they want a mainstream device that hooks into all of the user's social circles in addition to the features of the current generation. They also want as many teraflops as is economically possible to deliver to consumers, as this will enable Epic to create the best quality experience as possible which in turn will drive consumers to purchase a new machine.

"The thing that separates consoles from FarmVille is the fact that consoles define the high-end gaming experience," he said. "When you look for the best graphics available in the whole game industry today, you look at Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and those games are the best out there, bar none. And so the big opportunities for future consoles is to bring that to an entirely new level by delivering a dramatic increase in raw computing power."

What Epic doesn't want is a device that's as open as Android. "Android is anarchy," he added. "It's extremely hard to ship a game that actually works on a large number of Android devices, because there's so much variety and so much openness and a lack of cohesive certification process for applications. We do not want open as in Android -- that would be a disaster for the business."

Getting back to Unreal Engine 4, Epic hopes to showcase the new platform in public by the end of 2012. It's also reportedly running on a single card powered by Nvidia's Kepler hardware. Last year the Unreal Engine 3-based "Samaritan" demo required three high-end Nvidia cards and a monster PSU -- now it runs on the same single Kepler-based board used by the UE4 demos.

"We can get so more out of that card than what you saw in Samaritan," said Epic Games VP Rein during GDC. Sounds like hardware is finally catching up with the software.

Electronic Arts commits $80 million to next-gen console development

May 7, 2012 2:37 PM
Rob LeFebvre

In a call with investment analysts today, Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello reported that his company is investing $80 million in what he called “fourth-gen” console development.

He also expressed a strong opinion that console gaming would continue to gain in the coming years, and that EA plans to get in on the new upswing with this significant investment in research and development.

EA also said that, as a result of its increase in next-generation console investment, it will have a small round of layoffs and eliminate some licensed titles that are not part of that strategy.

This may only indicate strong Wii U development at this time, with Sony playing it cagey and Microsoft not saying much of anything about new consoles coming down the road.

This is, however, the first confirmed commentary on EA’s commitment to the next-generation console business, especially with its increased activity in casual, downloadable PC, and mobile games.

Iniciado por Serpiente_Plyskeen

Unreal Engine 4 Not For Current Platforms (Except Kepler)

Nvidia Pushes Kepler for Cloud Gaming With GeForce Grid

02:18 - Wednesday 16 May 2012 by Marcus Yam - source: Tom's Hardware US

Nvidia announced a new gaming-focused cloud implementation of its Kepler GPU technology.

Although the majority of focus at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference is on the enterprise, scientific and business uses for graphics processors, the company didn't forget that many people buy its products for gaming.

Today, Nvidia announced what it calls the GeForce Grid cloud gaming platform, which is all about streaming next-generation games to virtually any device, without the amount of lag that hampers current offerings.

Using the Kepler architecture, GeForce Grid GPUs minimize power consumption by simultaneously encoding up to eight game streams. This allows providers to cost-effectively scale their service offerings to support millions of concurrent gamers.

Featuring two Kepler architecture-based GPUs, each with its own encoder, the processors have 3,072 CUDA technology cores and 4.7 teraflops of 3D shader performance. This enables providers to render highly complex games in the cloud and encode them on the GPU, rather than the CPU, allowing their servers to simultaneously run more game streams. Server power-consumption per game stream is reduced to about one-half that of previous implementations, an important metric for data centers.

At GTC, Nvidia and Gaikai demonstrated a virtual game console, consisting of an LG Cinema 3D Smart TV running a Gaikai application connected to a GeForce Grid GPU in a server 10 miles away. What appeared was relatively lag-free play through just an Ethernet cable and wireless USB game pad connected to the TV.

At the post-event keynote Q&A, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in response to a question clarified some of the latency claims. Nvidia's slide claims that it's able to drop more than 100ms from current cloud services and be even better than today's local consoles.

Digging a bit deeper into those numbers, Huang said that today's consoles are using technology that's 6-7 years old. With that hardware stretched to the very limit, machines are already straining to deliver the most latency-free play. In comparison, he says, Kepler can deliver 60 frames-per-second without breaking a sweat. Furthermore, images rendered by Kepler now skip the framebuffer, further cutting down time in the hardware.

Much of the speed increase comes right from the faster hardware in Kepler, with the external factor of the display remaining static. There's no doubt in our minds that GeForce Grid – which is essentially a brand of Nvidia Kepler-powered cloud gaming hardware – is faster than what we had yesterday, but then again, what we will have tomorrow will always be faster than what we have today.

The real interesting possibility to come out of the savings afforded by more advanced hardware is what Nvidia hopes to become a Netflix-like economy of scale. Instead of devoting one GPU to one user, Kepler in servers can split the load to achieve bigger cost and power efficiencies. Nvidia envisions this to lead to a flat $10 monthly games subscr1ption, and that's something everyone would want.

I have to say, some of their comparisons seem... unfair.

Their main chart compares three things: regular "console connected to display", "current cloud systems", and "GRID cloud rendering".

First off, they cite 66ms latency just at the display level, which is definitely at the higher end of the spectrum. But at least they use the same latency in each.

Their cloud/cloud comparisons are also quite suspicious. Reducing encode by 60%, yeah, I can buy that. Reducing *decode* - which, I remind you, is done client-side - by the same amount is also suspicious in light of their "this does not require an nVidia client, it will work with any h.264 decoder" claim.

Then they claim to have reduced network latency, and significantly (75ms to 30ms). Now, I can vaguely see how they *could* - if they can reduce bandwidth usage significantly, they might eke out a bit less latency, but I highly doubt they can more than *double* their compression efficiency. Unless they're doing something crazy like putting a network interface directly on the GPU (one image they show contradicts that theory), I think this claim is also pretty dubious.

The worst one is the "game pipeline" time. While I can believe that a newer, more powerful graphics card can definitely perform *twice* as well as an older one, I can also state definitively both that "you can put that new card in the home console as well" and "new games will expand to use that power, leaving you back where you started at 100ms render times". The former I can state because they've *already* released Kepler-based cards (to rave review, although my own seems to be backordered); the latter I can state because that's how the industry has worked since at least the late 70s.

Long story short, they seem to be doing some *extremely* unscientific, biased comparisons. Do they probably have something here? Yeah. Is it literally going to be as good as an actual console (or better yet, PC) connected directly to the console, as they claim? No.

Iniciado por Serpiente_Plyskeen

Pero bueno. Yo lo dejo aquí, y el tiempo dirá...

Iniciado por spamrakuen

Yo creo que es el futuro.

Con una TV, un cacharrin barato que haga de decoder y un mando, puedes jugar a cienes y cienes de juegos.

No solo eso, sino que ademas, puedes usar casi cualquier dispositivo, portatil, tablet, sobremesa, TV.... con casi cualquier sistema operativo (Windows, Android, Linux, iOS, MacOS,...)

Olvidarse de instalaciones, olvidarse de problemas de drivers, de sobrecalentamientos, de actualizar el juego, del "mi PC es demasiado lento tengo que cambiarlo para poder jugar", ...

Ademas, los fabricantes/desarrolladores tambien salen ganando; adios pirateria (solo por eso ya les sale a cuenta), adios a las diferentes versiones para diferentes consolas/dispotivos, adios al "la PS4 ha sido un fracaso de ventas", etc...

He probado el on-live, y a pesar de mi mierda conexion a internet y mi mierda PC, vi tantas ventajas que quise apuntarme, pero desafortunadamente aun no esta disponible en Hispanistan.

Iniciado por spamrakuen

Yo creo que es el futuro.

Iniciado por inmi_soy

Con mas de 300 post y 16 paginas, es demasiado para leer en el movil.

Si no es mucho abuso, un resumen para saber quien va ganando.

Iniciado por ikifenix

¿De verdad has podido jugar a algo con el onlive? Yo lo probé hace 1 año con un juego tan simple como Braid y era imposible por el lag, desde que le daba a saltar hasta que el muñeco saltaba, ya se había caido por algun agujero o me habían matado. Tengo vodafone 20mb (me llegan 15mb). Solo le veo futuro para los que tienen cable, o sea, para los usuarios de ono y poco más.

Iniciado por ikifenix

¿De verdad has podido jugar a algo con el onlive? Yo lo probé hace 1 año con un juego tan simple como Braid y era imposible por el lag, desde que le daba a saltar hasta que el muñeco saltaba, ya se había caido por algun agujero o me habían matado. Tengo vodafone 20mb (me llegan 15mb). Solo le veo futuro para los que tienen cable, o sea, para los usuarios de ono y poco más.