Game Consoles - History and Future...How does that Impact the Market Today?

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In this episode, Rob and PJ explore the history of consoles. How did some of the technological advances from the 80s and 90s influence the rise of capabilities we see today?

With the increasing convergence in hardware between the XBox and Playstation towards a PC model, where does the market go from here? Is Nintendo the big winner?

Finally, does this convergence play into the current set of layoffs, where skills become more fungible across platforms?

(And yes...a tiny addendum at the end on mobile gaming...)

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Ierengaym.

(00:03):
com ierengaym.
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PJ (00:14):
All right, everybody.
Welcome back to Tricky Bits withRob and pj.
Today we're going to take a bothtimeless and timely discussion
on consoles, game consoles, boththeir history of where they've
come from, their future, andtalk a little bit about the

(00:35):
state of the game industrytoday, now, Rob, I remember as a
kid a flotilla of hardware thatused to exist.
There was pong and televisionColecoVision.
Atari in the US anyway, was thegiant lion of the early eighties

(00:59):
all the way until the NES hitthe scene.
In which case that really tookthe zeitgeist of everything at
that moment in time.
it seemed that everyone hadtheir own form factor.
Everyone had their own format.
Everyone had some overlap ingames, but a lot of it really

(01:19):
was like, okay, you know, wehave these bespoke things.
And at for a little while untilthe NES hit the scene, almost
very little difference in mymind between a lot of the game
hardware manufacturers and thenthe publishers.
And you had some companies likeEA that started to break that

(01:40):
Activision.
And nowadays all of that seemsto have collapsed into a couple
of different companies.
We seem to have Microsoft andSony nowadays.
Any thoughts on how we got fromthere to here?

Rob (01:57):
it's just the natural progression and I, I think we
got here because of the PC andthe cost of development and the
type of programs we have today.
Going back to the mid generationto consoles.
On the PlayStation three, I wasinvolved in the hardware of the
position three and there was alot of kickback against Sony for

(02:21):
having esoteric hardware.
I mean the PS three wasn't thatesoteric.
It was the same processor as theXbox 360, but we had the spu.
So in total it was more esotericthan a typical pc.
As we've talked about before,data design and laying out your
data such that the s ps couldDMA and use, it was part of

(02:42):
making the PS three work, butthe general consensus developers
hated it, which was one of thereasons why Mark Sony, when he
did the PSS four basically madeit a pc.
And that means PC code, PCtools, everything that you know
about a pc, mostly other thanthe typical system memory, video

(03:04):
memory split.
'cause the consoles are unifiedmemory.
Other than those, the consolestoday are a pc.
So I think that's how we gothere.
But going all the way back, allof the devices that you
mentioned and funny enough, theAT toy wasn't big in Europe
because their PAL support waskind of terrible.

PJ (03:25):
I was curious about that.

Rob (03:27):
and you can get them to output pal, but the colors are
weird.
I think if you do c camm, it'sonly black and white.
So there's lots and lots ofissues with the 2,600, which
made not popular in England andin Europe.
the 50 hertz, 60 hertz split wasa, a big thing too.
'cause obviously you've gottaraise the beam and all the, the
code was very timed to you.

(03:49):
It took three pixels perinstruction, something like that
in a scan line on the 2,600.
But on PAL that's differentbecause the lines are a
different size.
So the whole game changedbecause the game was
interleaved.
All the game logic wasinterleaved with actually
drawing the display.
So the type of games you coulddo were different.
And a lot of games wouldn'teasily port it.

(04:10):
Not as easy as you think it isto take a 60 hertz, 2,600 game
and make it 50 hertz on a biggerscreen.
Just never forget.
And, uh, par is higher, ishigher resolution And has a
different number of lines.

PJ (04:20):
and lower frame

Rob (04:21):
Yeah.
And has a different number oflines that are invisible.
And that's where you did all thegame logic.
So overall, the timing was veryspecific to NTSC.
So those games didn't pull, uh,very well.
So overall, 2,600 was notpopular in England and in
Europe.
The home computers were verypopular as we talked about in
origin stories.

(04:41):
I had a BBC micro that fed, itwas a com 64 was very popular.
The com amigo was incrediblypopular.
Atari really showed up.
The ST was very popular.
The 800 before it was a little.
Popular.
It's when it had a real, thatone, a real graphic strip so
could drive Palt sc the same butdifferently.

(05:04):
So the consoles didn't getpopular in England until the
Mega Drive, which was called theGenesis here.
So the, the, Sega Genesis andthe UK was called the Sega Mega
Drive.
Uh, that was incredibly popular.
The Nintendos at the time, theNES super NES were very,
popular.

(05:25):
The Game Boy was also verypopular.
Well, back then, all of theearly consoles, even in the US
too, is every game was bespokeand every game was exclusive.
It's this game was a Nintendogame.
This game was a Sega game.
And then in the backgroundyou've got the Amigo and the St,
and the PC and the Apple two allkind of having these games that
were ported back and forth.

(05:47):
So there was always kind of a, adisjoint market.
There was the the home computermarket, which became the PC
market, and there's the bespokeconsole market.

PJ (05:57):
and in the console market, part of it was ip, but part of
it was also capability, right?
I mean, I couldn't run Sonic on,let's say the NES or SNES,
right?
I mean,

Rob (06:11):
The games were made for what the hardware could do.
So if you had great scrollingspray hardware, you'd have great
scrolling Sprite based games.
And the games were veryspecific.
So porting Sonic, even thoughtechnically it's possible from a
mega drive to a Super Nintendowas for example, is possible,
but it wouldn't be the samegame.

(06:32):
the way the timing works, eventhose games are still racing the
beam down the screen.
'cause they're changing the maptiles.
As the raster goes down thescreen, as soon as you've passed
certain point on the screen, youknow, everything above it could
be changed.
So you'll change it for the nextframe.
So it's still kind of onlysingle buffered data.
So it's very hardware based.
It's, it's very Rasta based,where the PC never had that.

(06:52):
The Amiga did, but didn't havethe Sprite hardware power that
the consoles had.
And back then Sprites were King.
Artists knew how to make Spritesknew how to animate them.
Could you rotate them, could youscale them all?
Things like that were all partof the key hardware so the games
were made specifically for thatplatform.
And then obviously the IP cameinto it where it's like, we now
have this great game calledSonic and we're just gonna keep

(07:13):
making those games.
And today, the fact that Sonicexists on a Nintendo platform is
mind blowing.

PJ (07:20):
Sure.
Sure.

Rob (07:21):
but so the PC was always in the background, but it couldn't
do these games.
It couldn't do the fast actionSprite games.
'cause the PC's always been Vone based.
It never had hardware back inthe day.
It was always software,rendered.
It had a few sprites that youcould do in direct draw, mid
nineties type era.

PJ (07:36):
What's interesting, Rob, is 'cause you make a mention that
the PSS three, 10 years later isconsidered esoteric hardware.
But is it fair to say thateffectively, like in this mid,
early to mid nineties or maybeeven eighties through nineties,
every bit of hardware wasesoteric?
Like the PC had its limitations,like NES had its thing, Genesis

(07:57):
had its thing like each of thesethings were just

Rob (07:59):
Oh, absolutely.
There was nothing consistentabout any of these consoles.
It was all assembler, it was allinterrupt level programming,
chasing the beam, generating,interrupt the, change the
sprite, do this, blah, blah,blah.
It was all very bare metal asyou would call it today.
Program.
There was no operating systeminvolved.
It was all fairly bespoke forthat particular piece of

(08:19):
hardware.
And that's what consoleprogramming was.
You went game programmers onhome computers, which were very
the Amiga is the exception'causeit's kind of both.
You had PC programmers say,which started to make the bigger
games.
The Adventure games.
The games that first were on CDrom, used more memory, had more
resources as a whole.
That's where the bigger gamescame from.
Then you had the programmers whostuck with the consoles and just

(08:42):
hammered out the best thingsthey could over the life of the
console.
And in some ways the PC modelsthe best way to go because
everything you learn, you cancontinue to build on.
Where in consoles, nothingchanges for five years.
And then everything you knowsirrelevant, you've gotta learn
everything again.
And that step actually took outa lot of companies because as we
went from 2D to 3D, a lot ofcompanies that were great at the

(09:04):
2D side, never transitioned tothe 3D world.
So you have all this dichotomybetween the PC and the consoles.
And that lasted all the wayuntil the PS two, I would say
was the last, the Saturn wasincredibly hard to program.
It had this like weird 128people register, which I still
don't know what it does, uh, ifyou either configure all the DMA
timings and cycle into leavingand things like that.

(09:26):
Um, yeah, I could, I never didfigure that thing out.
The Saturn was like sega's lastattempt, I think it was the last
year.
It was up against thePlayStation one, and it kind of
faded out before the two.
And then the Xbox, original Xboxwas up against the PlayStation
two so when we made the Xbox, wewere called insane because we

(09:46):
used PC hardware.
It was like, this was the peakesoteric of consoles it was
understood that consoles wereconsoles and not PCs.
So when we made the Xbox, wewere called crazy because we was
like, okay, everything's inplace to make a game console
from PC Hardware.
And the Xbox was literally a pc.
It had an Nvidia, slightlycustom chip functionally, not

(10:10):
custom audio was all PC basedDSP audio at the time.
Direct sound, uh, 3D audio.
All that was done in a NvidiaDSP, which is actually a TI
think it was A-T-I-D-S-P in theNvidia chip.
that was all done on there.
Had a South bridge of NorthBridge, had an Intel, supposed
to be md, but ultimately wasIntel processor.

(10:31):
And it was effectively a PC witha slightly different operating
system.
So it transitioned from beinghardware to software, like the
hardware didn't matter, it wasthe services and things that
became important.
As we transitioned consultonline and Xbox Live PSM.
And these things showed up ofsecurity started to matter.

(10:53):
Protection started to matter.
Having a store you could protectso the platform could sustain
itself, started to matter.
Companies like Microsoft were ina much better position to
provide things like networkstack and.
This was kind of the, where thetraditional console started to
flounder.
It was like, okay, we need allof this support.
We're gonna do online play.

(11:14):
And then Microsoft was already,they're not the best at
networking, but they already hadthe networking stack from the
Windows side and they had a lotof software engineers, a lot of
software research, and a lot ofoutright written code to pull
from.
So as the operating system andthe support and everything
transitioned to be more like atypical pc, whether it be B, s,

(11:36):
D based, Linux based, windowsbased, doesn't matter.
It's the services that you gotis what mattered.
At that point, the consoles kindof did just become PCs.
They was the 360 and the PSthree were esoteric, but had
customer operating systems whichsupported them.
And then, like I said, thefeedback was so brutal against

(11:57):
Sony versus the 360, which wasalso esoteric.
'cause it wasn't X 86, but ithad six symmetrical cores.
It was three basically ppu fromthe cell, each one with two
threads.
So you had six hardware threads.
You wrote code that was standardmulti-threading.
It was basically Windows APIsacross six threads.
And you just wrote standardWindows code.

(12:17):
You could take your X 86 codefrom Windows.
We pilot it and it would work.
Yes, they did modify Direct X.
So you've got lower levelaccess, but Direct X was still
there in its PC form.
So your PC code would more orless just work around this same
time.
All the tools started to migratetowards Visual Studio.
Sony had their own SSN systemstools for the PSS three, for the

(12:38):
PSS four, and that was allintegrated into Visual Studio.
PS five's no different.
Microsoft have always beenintegrated into Visual Studio
that was the, the litmus thatset everything else going.
People had Visual Studio for pc,they had Visual Studio for Xbox
and they could just click abutton and recompile for the
other platform and it justworked.
The development tools onMicrosoft side have always been

(13:01):
great And the Sony side was kindof all these haddock pieces put
together some command linetools.
Very good tools.
Mind you, you could do very gooddebugging with the s and
debugger.
You could.
The profiling tools, the GPUbreakdown tools were very good,
but over time, that's beenintegrated into Visual Studio.
So now it's just expected thatyou will use Visual Studio,

(13:21):
that's kind of the letterstowards the pc.
Like lots of big games were madeon the pc.
The engines, the Unreal, theUnity engines got big on the PC
and they wanted traction on theconsoles.
The people using those engineswanted the engine on the
consoles, so it kind of justbecame this PC fest that just
kind of happened naturally.

(13:42):
There was no intent that itwould go this way.
It's just literally the marketpushed it that way.

PJ (13:47):
so let's roll back the clock a little bit.
'cause I think there's a bit weshould chat about, uh, the
evolution of the graphics cardside.
And I, I, I am gonna dovetailback to, to consoles for a
second because, you know, backin the day when you had the
cartridge, you shoved in there,I mean, it obviously was sort of
conceptually equivalent to adisc drive and I would load it

(14:09):
up on my machine.
But there's one game that Ireally think is really
fascinating to talk about, whichis starfox, the original starfox
on the SNES, which not only wasthe game, but they also embedded
a chip in there so they could domore complex polygonal like 3D

(14:29):
rendering, which was kind of avery cool idea, which is like,
oh, you know, for this game weare using the hardware inside of
this cartridge to expand thecapabilities of your machine.
And I do think that there's,there's some pivot point that's
in there that we start to leadourselves down this path of what

(14:50):
we need to do is like createsome new set of cards, which
ultimately became the graphicscards that we'd be shoving into
our PCs.

Rob (14:58):
so there's a few things there to pick up on the hardware
companies.
There was loads of hardwarecompanies in the mid nineties.
If you look at the like earlydirect draw saying 4,000, the
TSS 4,000, uh, the matrix cards,a TI and VIT didn't really exist
at this point in time.
This was all 2D days and directdraw was kind of the, the

(15:20):
starting point for the 2Dengines for Windows.
They realized that the, thehardware had all of these
hardware blitzers built in,'cause it's how you move in
windows around the screen.
Like if you want to move awindow bl it, you don't have to
literally rerender the window ina different position.
You can just take the old oneand move it over here.
And so these video cards startedagain, memory, basically all

(15:41):
that memory was for GDI to usein Windows.
It would keep snippets of blitzof windows and it would just bl
little 2D rectangles with themwith without Alpha to, uh, make
this happen.
That's why you have accelerateddesktops back in the day.
And they were very fast and verynice to use.
But then someone at Microsoft,Colin McCarthy, his name was
Scottish Guy, realized that youcould use that BL engine in the

(16:05):
graphics card to Blitz Sprites.
You could do little rectangleand BL into the screen and you
could start to use the samehardware for a different
purpose.
Some of it was great'cause ithad alpha support and pallet
support and things like that.
And some of it wasn't'causeWindows didn't need it.
Over the next couple ofgenerations of video card, this
all standardized into, basicallythese are the features that we
support Autumn, people wereusing this blitz hardware in

(16:27):
Doss.
And way before Direct Drawshowed up, by the way, people
figured out, oh, we can pokethese registers and we could get
this thing to BL rectangles.
And so people were using it waybefore Windows, but then Windows
standardized it with directdraw, have an API that you could
easily access very low level,not very low overhead.
But again, the type of gamesthat were me were changed.
So it's that transition to 3D iswhat took a lot of the companies

(16:49):
out.

Track 1 (16:50):
So going back to your point about Starfox,, before we
go any further, I wanna pointout that in the UK it was called
Star Wing.
So if you look online, there isa lot of information.
You have to search for bothnames, but there's a lot of info
out there..
So to figure out how Star Foxworks and how it did what it
did, we really have to go backto the original consoles with

(17:11):
cartridges like the 2,600 andthe Kika vision.
The cartridge isn't just astorage device.
It's not like it's a flashcardand you're reading from it and
putting it into rem.
The cartridge is just a RO onthe buzz of the processor, and
it executes directly from therum.

(17:32):
So although the 2,600, forexample, only had 256 bytes of
ram, you could execute as muchcode as you wanted.
From the room and I say as muchcode as you wanted, that isn't
quite true.
The 2,600 had, I believe, 24pins that went over the
cartridge and eight data lines,13 address lines, and a couple

(17:55):
of grounds and a power, and thatwas it.
There was no control lines, nonothing.
So those 13 address lines giveus eight K of accessible space.
But there were cards that hadmore than eight K.
You could get 16 K, 2,600cartridges.
How is that possible with only13 address lines the 20th
century hundred, like I said,had no control lines of the

(18:18):
processor going to thecartridge.
It was assumed you would alwaysread from the cartridge.
So the read right line, which isa pin on the processor, doesn't
go to the cartridge.
It just goes across the board tothe ram and some other devices
on the motherboard, but doesn'tgo to the cartridge.
So it was always assumed youwould only ever read from the
cartridge.
So doing small things likelooking for a special address

(18:40):
and then switching, the bank ofa valuable memory isn't
something you could triviallydo, but in effect, that's really
what happened.
You would do things like readfrom a special address instead
of what you'd assume to be rightto an address to switch a bank.
You'd just read from a fixedaddress, and the hardware on the
cartridge would detect that.

(19:01):
Address being accessed anddifferent address would be in
different Bank of Rome and itwould just page in four or even
the whole AK at the time.
And that's how the biggercartridges worked.
This is kind of important'causeit sets the stage for what we
call smarter cartridges,cartridges that did things that

(19:21):
weren't intended and.
Because it's just the buzz ofthe processor.
That's the interface to thecartridge..
As long as you kept withintiming and AB obeyed everything
you had to obey, you could doall of these tricks and the base
console would be non the wiserlater consoles fix some of this
problem by having the controllines of the processor go to the

(19:45):
cartridge.
I don't think it was intendedthat cartridges would do smart
things, but it kind of was tosome extent because the read
write pin went over there.
So obviously it was intendedthat maybe someone will put ram
in a cartridge.
So this happened a lot forthings like non-volatile
storage, and there were somecartridges that had ram in them
and it was used as extra memoryfor the game.

(20:07):
It wasn't very common, but itcertainly happened like I say,
they were very bespokesolutions, but this put a lot of
cost into the development of thegame, or at least the retail of
the game.
The development probably didn'tcost anymore, but for retail
now, you had to have engineers,electrical engineers to make
these cartridges design thecircuit boards and also the

(20:29):
extra cost of getting them madecartridges were not cheap to
begin with, and.
Having custom electronics inevery single cartridge just
added to the cost Like I said,it's a whole new team of people
who want nothing to do with thegame.
They're just there to supportthis custom hardware in the
cartridge,, so it, these customcartridges with extra hardware

(20:50):
weren't terribly common untilStar Fox, the game you
mentioned.
Earlier, and this one kind ofjust knocked it out of the park.
They basically put an entire newprocessor in the cartridge and
the processor, funny enough wascalled Mario, and I believe it
stood for mathematical organalrotation in io.

(21:13):
Everyone else knew it as theSuper fx, and if I recall, it
was a 16 bill.
Risk style processor, it hadsomething like 32 KA ram, a
megabyte of ROM, and had a framebuffer that was right next to
it..
And that custom processor wouldliterally render into its local
frame buffer.
It could do scale sprites, andyou could trick it into doing

(21:34):
scan lines, which you could beused to do.
Flat shaded triangles, which iswhat it was probably most famous
for.
But in the later Mario Games, itwas also used for, like I said,
scaling Sprites and rotatingSprites so the main processor
wasn't doing a whole lot in thissense.
Everything was done in thecartridge.
It was quite an ingenious way,but they really took it to the

(21:56):
limit as to what was possible.
But they weren't the only one todo it.
Everyone always thinks of thesesuper FX chips Capcom had a
thing called the CX four, whichkind of did the same thing.
It just helped out with math andcould do sprites and you could
trick it into doing flat shadedtriangles.
So I think what this reallypointed to is kind of the end of

(22:17):
life for the console.
It's if people are having tohide..
Fairly powerful processors andmemory and everything else.
Basically a whole computer inthe cartridge.
It's a good sign that yourconsoles get into the end of its
life and it's in fact whathappened.
Yeah, these were all the latestgeneration, the late generation
Super Nintendo games, and it wassoon replaced with its big, more

(22:40):
powerful big brother.

PJ (22:41):
Which I think is actually an interesting point because like
at the same time, this ishappening in the nineties.
I mean, you do start to see thisinflux of 3D or 3D like games
that are on the pc.
I mean, it starts withWolfenstein 3D, which I know is
not quite 3D, but then you'vegot Doom, you get Quake that

(23:01):
starts to pop up.
And that combined with thenetwork connectivity that the
PCs had for enabling multiplayergames really seemed like this
was a big advantage that the PCswere, were gaining over
consoles, which largely had beenlocalized

Rob (23:20):
I mean, we, we had the whole, initially like the, the
land politics.
People drag a PC to yourfriend's house and you'd plug it
into the same land and you'dplay, you'd, you'd play Quake
and the hot.
So Quake had a software render.
John Carmack wrote a, It'sfantastic render.
It's a classic code in there.
Mike, Abrash also helped out, Iguess some of the most famous

(23:41):
code in there is Ash's articlesfrom Dr.
Dobbs Journal back in the dayAnd lots of PC programs learn to
program from those classic MikeAbrash articles.
At the time, yeah, hardware wasbecoming more popular in PCs.
We talked about this in.
About trespasser too, when youhad a great software renderer
that had features of thehardware couldn't do of like,

(24:01):
did you pick the features or didyou pick the speed, of the
hardware?
Most people pick the speed ofthe hardware.
You started to have Glide 3D, FXand all of those show up and
very gls, very fast APIs, veryminimal feature set, but enough
to do quake.
So quake was this first 60hertz, ultra high resolution,
violently a filtered kind offilter fest back in the day.

(24:24):
If you look back, it's like, ohmy eyes, everything's fuzzy and
blowy and uh, it's, uh, but itwas fast and It worked.
It worked really good And thenas people started to get
ethernet based internet, fasterinternet, other than that a OL
Pac Bell type dialup systems nowyou'd start to play with your
friends over the internet.
So a PC solve a lot of the, howdo you do a online game with

(24:47):
long latency and things likethat and make the game fun.
So a lot, all of this came fromthe PC space consoles were still
stuck without networkconnectors.
A lot of that core tech, whichis what consoles are based
around today, came from the pc.
A lot of that came because likethe consoles were hard to
program.
And don't forget you couldn'tjust buy a Nintendo dev kit.
It's today, it's remarkably easyto get a PlayStation DEF kit or

(25:10):
Xbox DEF kit or a Nintendo DEFkit.
None of this exists existed backthen.
If a university would've calledSega or Nintendo in 1993 and
said like, can we get some deathkits?
They'd have been like, no.
It was a very closed market.
It's who you knew was how yougot your death kit.

PJ (25:27):
The dev kits were not cheap.
They were 10,$50,000.
They were expensive.

Rob (25:31):
they were ridiculously priced.
It was like you and now the sameprice as a regular piece of
hardware have free in some casesso will give'em to you.
Microsoft will too.
I dunno much about Nintendo,they'll probably give you one
too.
It's the only way you can take acontent is to get kits out
there.
This all goes back to like theclosed market nature of it.
It's like these companies wantedthe high costs'cause they kept
people out.

(25:51):
If it was 50 grand for a deathand you could afford it, you
were guaranteed to make gamesfor that platform.
This all played out in the Xbox.
We originally talked about nothaving any sort of license fee
for games and the powers that beat the time, ea in particular
caused a huge stink.
Like it went all the way to Billbecause,

PJ (26:09):
didn't they?

Rob (26:10):
They were adamant they?
wanted the fee.
They, they happily pay the fee,to keep, they didn't want to
compete with Jerry Blogs whomight have the next best idea.
They'd rather buy the idea fromJerry belongs and make it their
idea.
Then let him compete with them.
So the license fee stay and it'sstill there to this day probably
good because they needed themoney to pay the bill, so all of

(26:32):
this kind of converged at thesame time.
The PC was leading the way incertain types of gameplay,
online multiplayer games inparticular, 3D in particular was
very big driving force from thepc.
The consoles had a differenttrajectory.
They were coming from the singleplayer world, very high like

(26:52):
Twitch type, blaming,platformers were still very big.
And we had this release cycleand we still have it to this day
where consoles are what they arefor five years.
And in the meantime, the PC wason this continuous improvement
where the consoles kind of takethis staircase approach where
it's like, take a huge jump fiveyears, take a huge jump five
years, where the PC's just thiscontinuous onslaught of

(27:16):
everything getting better allthe

PJ (27:17):
Which creates different dynamics, right?
I mean, that's a differentmarket dynamic, which is that
yes, I could, I could upgrade tothe latest RTX chip every year
if I want to at this point intime to be at that bleeding
edge.
But I also don't know if I wannadrop two, three K on a graphics
card every year.
And so that creates a very smallmarketplace

Rob (27:39):
it is, that's small though.
When you think there's a billionPCs, it's, there's enough of
those people who will supportit.
And it's just like you buy a newpc, you get last generations
hardware, you can buy a 30 90alpha.
Basically, pennies and fortiesare still expensive, but
twenties, you can't even sell'emon eBay.
It's, it's like there's a littlewindow where it's good, But

(27:59):
you've gotta bear in mind thisalso affects development more
than it affects consumers.
If you are making a console gametoday, if you are making a PSS
five game today, there's rumorsof a PSS five Pro.
Sure.
But let's assume you're making aPSS five game.
You still have to target thebase.
PSS five, the specs are known.
What you can do is known.
You get better performance bybeing better programmers,

(28:22):
naughty dog, insomniacs, all ofthose people, the gorillas of
the world, are very good atknowing like, we can do this.
This is the next step we'regonna take.
So they look at it, the factthat if we don't optimize the
hell out of this system, or thisalgorithm, or this entire
engine, our competitors will andthey'll have better games than
we do.
And that's the drive and theconsole has always been optimize

(28:45):
the hell out of the process, thegame, the tools, everything to
make the best game you can forthe budget.
PCs don't have that problem.
If I'm making a PC game now, Ican say, well, I'm not gonna
ship for two years, and in twoyears this hardware take a guess
at what it will be just on atrajectory from two years prior.
Hardware be able to do this.
So if my game runs like crapright now, it's okay because it

(29:09):
won't when it ships and it's ahard line to walk.
Plenty of people have walkedthis plank and fell off and got
it completely wrong.
Especially a few years backwhere multi-core processes came
out because people were going,oh, we're at three gigahertz and
we'll go to 4, 5, 6, 7 gigahertzor just this this linear
interpolation of being like,well that didn't happen.

(29:30):
Processes went back in speed,but we got more of them.
That screwed a lot of peoplebecause they were expecting
their code, single threaded codeto run twice as fast in two
years, when in reality it ranhalf as fast, but you had eight
calls.
Different way to write code.
So predicting it's hard, but youcan do it where in a console you
don't even attempt.
Like people make it PSS five progames now if it exists, all they

(29:53):
know what specs are, they'rejust making it for that spec,

PJ (29:56):
you're guaranteed about five to seven years of, of length of
time of that console beingaround.
that's the other side of this,right?
Which is that I have a constancythat I can count on of like,
Hey, this is gonna be thestandard console specs for half
to three quarters of a decade.

Rob (30:14):
Yeah, for sure.
And that breed, different typeof programmers.
You get the programmers who wantthat continuous evolution who
I'll just let the hardware takecare of it and you get the
programmers.
I want to get the most out ofthis.
And so there's still a splitbetween good console programmers
and good PC programs.
It's much easier than ever to goback and forth.
Previously it was next toimpossible to go back and forth.

(30:35):
The only people who could do it,you had know 68,000 assembler.
But then when you got the MIPchips and things like that, you,
it was much more difficult to goback and forth'cause there was
no seed back then,

PJ (30:44):
Yeah.
Yeah.

Rob (30:45):
at least in the console space.
Knowing the hardware was like,I'm a Sega programmer and I can
make that thing dance, but Ican't do shit on the Nintendo.
I'd have to take two years tolearn.
By which point it'll beirrelevant.
'cause the next one will be out.
So the good console program isget in from day one and they
stick with that a piece ofhardware and they keep going
from there, PCs, this continuousramp.

(31:07):
But now we're seeing a differenttype of approach for consoles
even because the PSS five isvery much an evolution of the
PSS four plays, PSS four gamesflawlessly.
They're not emulated, they justrun.
And so it's backwardscompatible.
It's the same a MD processes.
It's the same A MD GPUs, it'sthe same operating system.

(31:29):
It's kind of the PC model In amore staggered approach, Xbox is
the same.
an Xbox today has the two As theX and the S, which are very
different performance beasts.
And you have to write games forboth.
They're kind of all backwardscompatible with the Xbox One.
Same model.
Why do we have consoles,

PJ (31:50):
today?
Why is it effectively Sony andMicrosoft at this point in time?

Rob (31:54):
this Nintendo and I think Nintendo is the ultimate winner
here.
'cause they're the ones who havethe old console mentality and
they have the games that go withit.
They have these great games thatare fun to play.
Sony and Microsoft are bothgoing down the PC path.
Microsoft would love the

PJ (32:08):
Sure.

Rob (32:08):
be a PC in your

PJ (32:09):
It's the media PC idea that they always had.

Rob (32:12):
Always had this idea of like, the Xbox is just a PC in
your living room.
And over time it's becoming moreand more pclike.
Today you can literally runWindows code on an Xbox and it
will compile.
You have a, you create a window,you have a message pump, and
it's like the main loop of aXbox app is a Windows app.
So it all looks very Windowslike.

(32:32):
And then you factor in thatMicrosoft don't have any
exclusives.
Not many, not, not like Sony do.
So what is the future?
Let's look at the future ofconsults.
We've talked just of past ofconsults, how we got here, but
what's the future?
Is there any point in keepmaking two platforms?
Why don't Sony and Microsoftjust get together and make, this
is the console that we're gonnamake and we're all gonna make

(32:54):
games for you.
Is that just the piece thing inyour living room or is it the 3D
model where there's a spec andanyone can make hardware to that
spec and add bits and removebits, but you can't break the
base spec.
That's literally what three DOdid.
Panasonic made the only three Dswe had, but there were some
others that were out there,which are far rarer than the

(33:14):
Panasonic ones.
Would that help?
It would get Microsoft to wherethey want.
I don't think Microsoft want tomake hardware.
They, they do it because theyhave to.
I think Sony also potentiallylike, eh, there's not much in
it.
We're basically making PCs.
I can envision a world wherethere's only a box you put under
your tv.
It's, it's just the gameconsole.

(33:36):
And it's literally same as it istoday.
It's a PC in a box, and the onlydifference between the
PlayStation five and the XboxSeries X is the operator system.
the software stack is what'sdifferent.

PJ (33:46):
so in the previous generation, I remember you
telling this me this a number oftimes.
I think it was the.
The Xbox One and the PSS four.
The only difference wasbasically The speed of ram.
are we saying that now in thevery latest generation?

Rob (34:01):
That's the, Same Now speeds are different.

PJ (34:04):
This, okay, so the,

Rob (34:06):
RAM speeds

PJ (34:06):
is the same.

Rob (34:07):
Yeah.
It's basically, it's a, it's amulti, it's an A-M-D-A-P-U with
unified memory.
The only significant differencebetween the two is the software
stack and how you write gamesfor it.
You could just meet in themiddle.
They are different enough thatsome things work on one and not
on the other.
But they both have ray tracing.
They both have the samegeneration GPUs, so they both

(34:29):
have the same features.
How those features are exposedis slightly different across the
two

PJ (34:33):
well, this is interesting because is there an argument to
be made that Microsoft isincentivized to basically create
a unified stack between likeit's Windows, PC machines and
Xbox, but Sony is incentivizedfor performance reasons.
And so, you use a BSD kernel.

(34:53):
So unless effectively we get.
You know, wine on BSD as beingthe ultimate goal of what
Windows ends up to be.
Like, is this actually like the,the breakpoint between the two?
Like they're incentivized indifferent ways to say like, Hey,
windows wants this as a,something unified.
Sony wants still to be ahead ofthe game in terms of, you know,

(35:16):
pure performance.
Is that enough of adifferentiation or is that, am I
making shit up?

Rob (35:22):
I think you're making shit up.
Uh, it's, it's, uh, yes, there'sdifference between the
platforms, but it's nothing thatcouldn't be overcome.
I think Microsoft just want thecohesion with Windows and Xbox
because it's easier.
It's like, windows is fine,let's just make Xbox the same.
Could it be better?
Yes.
Which is what the PlayStationdoes, but how much do developers

(35:45):
really want it?
And I'd say to some extent theydo want it because all the
exclusive games they wantPlayStation, everything else on
Xbox is mostly just unrealengine or back ports from the
PlayStation.
This brings us to anotherinteresting point of now it's
not just these ultra exclusivesyou've now got, big cost
platform games, that's your ownby Microsoft.

(36:07):
Microsoft just bought ActivisionBlizzard and now they have Call
of Duty, which they have tosupport for PlayStation.

PJ (36:14):
They do.
Yeah.

Rob (36:16):
they make a reasonable effort or do they sabotage their
cash cow to make it worse onPlayStation when people are
expecting it to be on par orbetter on PlayStation?
'cause most games are.
So how does that all fit in?
How does it fit?
In The same for Sony.
Sony by studios and they tendnot to continue making Xbox
games, uh, Microsoft by studios.

(36:38):
And they do continue makingPlayStation games.
So there is this muddling of thewater if you wish, because now,
you don't even have any secrets.
You can't say, well, Microsoftdon't know what we're doing.
'cause they have their, theyhave your SDK and they have your
future.
They have at least as muchinformation as you're given to
any other developer that's notultra first party.
And they have to be involved innew release cycles.
If they're gonna keep makingcall of duty for the PSS six,

(37:00):
then Microsoft need a PSS sixbefore it's out.
How does that fit into thedynamic of the market of we're
also competing with you again,I, I don't see, I see this being
a blip in time.
I don't see the current statusquo being sustainable.
'cause there's all thesequestions that need to get
answered into the future At somepoint, it's like this, just

(37:20):
hardware

PJ (37:21):
I mean this, this blip in time that we have, I mean,
we're, we're effectively haveentered in the hardware space
into a duopoly.
Yes.
Nintendo still exists.

Rob (37:32):
Got more successful than ever.
Switch, I believe, is like thesecond best selling console they
ever made or something likethat.
The third best selling consultever.

PJ (37:43):
Wow.

Rob (37:43):
Position two is first with 155 million greater than 155
million.
The Nintendo dss, the 154million,

PJ (37:53):
Hmm.

Rob (37:54):
and the switch is 132 million, which is more than the
PlayStation three at 87 million.
It's more than the PlayStationfour at 117 million.

PJ (38:07):
Hmm.

Rob (38:08):
It is more than a PlayStation five at 50 million.
So it's a very, very popular,console,

PJ (38:16):
Yeah.
Well that blows my duopolytheory out of the water.

Rob (38:19):
but it's a handheld, it's a different thing.
People can connect it to a tv,but it's not meant to compete
with the others.
It's in a different world.
it has some engine support fromthe other engines, but not as
much.
And again, it's very exclusive.
They've got lots of really coolfirst party games that are on
the switch and will stay on theswitch.
Nintendo is very open to like,I've got a quirky game I want to

(38:40):
play.
It's super fun to play.
It's super pretty, very muchlike Flower was on the PS three,
like that game company.
Remember that game?
It's beautiful games, superartistically weird.
Sony ultimately bought them.
And uh, but Nintendo is veryopen to those sort of games
where today, if you make anindie game, it's very hard to
find them anywhere on the Xboxor the PlayStation store because

(39:04):
the big companies pay to getlisted and that's how it works.
So there's no fair ranking chartstore, for example, where it's
like, oh, these are the bestindie games right now.
They're very hard to find.
Unless you know it exists,you're not gonna stumble on it.
Nintendo is far more open tothese games, and I think that
helps them.
I think it gives them that it'sstill an environment where you

(39:27):
can experiment.
Where I think the big consoleshave lost that.
It's basically first personshooters and exclusives, a
massive budget games outside ofthat very little
experimentation.

PJ (39:37):
and a lot of those, a lot of those exclusives are first
person shooters.

Rob (39:41):
It's all the same.
Uh, but yeah, there's not muchexperimenting.
You, if you show up with, evenas a registered, licensed
developer, you're not doing itin the game.
You're a full first partydeveloper.
If you make a quirky game, it'snot accepted very well.

PJ (39:55):
It's interesting because like we're, the way we're
talking about this, especiallywith Microsoft and Sony, these
things are converging onto a pc.
I mean, it's all becomesoftware.
There's very little hardwarebits that are unique that I'm
aware of.
Maybe if the, if they reresurrect basically, or do more

(40:18):
on the PlayStation VR side ofthings, that could be something
interesting.

Rob (40:23):
There's no reason Xbox could to make VR hardware
either.
They just don't want to.
I think we are converging on aPC architecture'cause developers
want that.
They wanna be able to justeasily pull the code.
They don't wanna spend moneymoving this stuff around.
They wanna know it works.
They want similar specs.
Like if you was to make anotherconsult today, you'd have to
make it similar spec for all ofthese reasons,

PJ (40:46):
well part of my point is you'd either have to make it as
similar specs and my response tothat is why bother just run it
on one of these things?
Or you would need to have asignificantly large enough
Gotcha.
A hook to have differenthardware to say, Hey, this is a

(41:07):
different type of game you canplay on these things now.
Where it's like radically likeshifted over.
And that's kind of why I bringup the VR side of things,
because at this moment, I mean,it's all software really.

Rob (41:21):
Yeah.
And it's software stackseverywhere.
Like third party libraries arethe same on both people use,
library X for audio, and theyexpect it to be on both
platforms.
They use standard networkstacks.
They expect it to be on bothplatforms.
things like Sony had all of thishype early on about how fast
they can load and the ultrastreaming type technology, but

(41:44):
that's really just like thedirect X 12 loading system that
PC's already had.
But software stacks across theboard are being unified into
this is what we use for audio.
This is what the engine we use,this is, what we use for
physics.
And there's a few options ineach of these, but it's mostly.
A handful of things.
So for developers it's like Iknow how to use havoc so I can

(42:06):
go to this company and do havoc.
I'm very good at doing W WiseAudio so I can go over here and
do W Wise audio.
It's like specialization in theprogram as it's happening and
happened for years.
And that allows people theflexibility to move around the
industry that's also inimportant, that fits in the
whole developer story.
And because me as a programmerwould prefer the old days or

(42:26):
even the switch, J as anaccountant doesn't see it

PJ (42:30):
Sure.
the standardization, as you say,makes programmers more fungible
now across these differentplatforms.
But to what we've been sayingnow, how, these platforms aren't
that different.
Like maybe there's a bit ofsoftware stack, a few APIs that
are bespoke between Sony Xbox,but if everyone's using Unreal
Engine or the Havoc physicsengine.

(42:50):
Using a standard network stackusing Lua, like all this stuff
really starts to look the sameand then it's all about, it's
not even like, Hey, I want toport this game over.
It's just like, you know what?
I'm gonna retarget, I'm gonnahit compile and let the compiler
effectively like do all theheavy work for me.

Rob (43:10):
Yeah.
I mean it's not even doing anyheavy work'cause it's exactly
same code would run on both ofthe same processor with the same
feature sets.
The big difference is theinterface to the audio and the
APIs for graphics and.
A lot of cross platform studios,even if they're not using on
Unreal or something like that,will just abstract that away.
They make their own rendering,API, which sits on top of, GL X,

(43:32):
whatever it's called, on aPlayStation and direct X 12 on
Xbox.
There aren't that many featuresthat aren't exposed on one
platform that are exposed onanother.
So that API now you just writeyour code to that API and even
be, if you wanna port it to athird platform, you just
re-implement that API, andthat's all you have to do As far
as the engine's concerned.

(43:53):
The thread model's the same.
The number of core you have tosplit those threads across is
the same.
It's all, I won't say easy, butit's easier than it's ever been.

PJ (44:02):
Well, what's fascinating is if I, from this conversation, if
I start to squint my eyes a bit,then the difference between the
PlayStation, the Xbox at a PClike all that difference starts
to fade away.
It just, it becomes a little bitin the noise.
Using that as a, a jumping offpoint is that any aspect of the
motivation for some of thelayoffs that we're seeing right

(44:25):
now, which is that if it's thesame to program each of these
things, I don't need as manybespoke programmers on any of
these things.
I can actually just utilize thesame code, retarget each of
these things really easily, andtherefore there's less need for
as many programmers or people atthese game companies.

(44:46):
Do you think that's playing intothat at all, or you think that's
entirely separate?

Rob (44:50):
I think if you're a junior programmer or a very seasoned
programmer, it's a differentargument.
Obviously the cost factors andthose two are very different
too.
Uh, but if, if you are aseasoned PSS five programmer,
then you're probably stayingwhere you are for now, and
you'll probably be the one whogets access to it next time
around.
If you're a junior programmerjust doing junior type game

(45:11):
developer jobs, then I thinkthere is a very high commonality
between the two platforms andwhen companies get acquired,
some of these jobs are notneeded.
I'd very much like to see theMicrosoft today announced they
were laying 1900 people off.
After the Activision Blizzardacquisition and it seems to be
all Activision Blizzard peopleworldwide.

(45:32):
How much of that is just due tooverlap with what Microsoft
already provides?
Uh, HR type jobs and things likethat, which now are technically
not leading'cause Microsoft willjust absorb the people.
how many middle managers, justgeneral reorging of moving this
org chart into this org chart,how many of those are from that?
And how many of those are fromlike we don't actually lead you

(45:54):
anymore.
I can't say Microsoft bringingthe Call of Duty team inside and
putting it under Microsoft GameStudios, for example.
I think it'll be ran as acompletely separate entity.
Everybody, I assume would stayas they are pretty much.
'cause I assume they're allneeded.
Otherwise Activision would'vegot rid of them.
So I'd like to see the breakdownof those jobs as to how it
affects devs, senior devs, artanimators, designers, and then

(46:18):
management as a whole.
Activision was a fairlyinefficient company, so I could
see them having a lot ofoverhead in management and I can
see a lot of the people in thislayoff being in that realm just
due to the nature of integratingthe two companies.
Happens all the time withairlines

PJ (46:35):
Any, acquisition?
It's the same story.

Rob (46:38):
Yeah, we're buying you for the product and the product
needs these staff.
So those staff are probably.
On the safer side of theacquisition than people who are,
have identical jobs in theparent organization.

PJ (46:52):
I've been thinking a lot about this one and, acquisitions
across the board.
This is true of every industry.
There's gonna be overlap.
You often see this kind of setof layoffs that will occur
because of the, exactly, theoverlap you're talking about, or
the shutting down product lines,et cetera, et cetera.
I do think there's also thisboom and bust cycle that we've

(47:15):
seen in games before, or mediain general.
Like once you're done with aproject, a whole bunch of people
get laid off and they go ontothe next project.
In this particular case, I thinkthe lion's share of this is the
acquisition.
The thing that gave me a bit ofpause is that they only closed
it I think three months ago.
I'll double check on that datejust to make sure I'm not wrong.

(47:36):
But it was fairly recent whenthey closed it.
And like, I usually think ofthis kind of like layoff period
as happening closer to sixmonths rather than three because
the amount of time you need tointegrate plus those three
months were taking place overthe holidays, which, you know,
stuff really slows down.
I do have this suspicion thatcan never be proven that there

(48:01):
are taking advantage of thelayoff cycle that is currently
in play right now to effectivelymake it part of the noise.
There's a, an old saying fromMachiavelli, which is commit all
of your sins at once.
So if they happen less often,they'll be more easily
forgotten.
And, you know, we're two weeksba or no, we're three weeks now

(48:23):
into January, like the last twoweeks we've seen massive layoffs
from Google, Twitch.
Discord Riot at this point intime also announced a bunch of
layoffs and so I don't know towhat extent Microsoft had
planned this already or istaking advantage of this and
sped up their timelineseffectively to try and make it a
part of the noise of the storythat's already in play.

Rob (48:45):
Yeah, I have no insight into that.
So I don't know.
We'll have to wait and see whathappens.
and is it part of the boom andbus cycle of games?
Maybe we are kind of over thepeak of the middle of the
current generation of consoles,so it's people know what they're
making for the rest of thisconsole generation type thing.
It happens periodically with thePC lifecycles and with the

(49:09):
console lifecycles.
I do think it's better now thanit ever has been because it used
to be hire a bunch of people,finish a game, fire them.
Now a lot of those jobs tend tobe done by contractors who want
to be contractors, and let'sdraw a very definite, definite
line here.
There are people who arecontractors who are forced to be
contractors and don't want to becontractors and should be

(49:30):
full-time employees.
That's a whole nother employmentargument to have.
But there are plenty of peopleout there, myself included, who
would happily do contract workfor any of these game companies
on a short, long, medium termbasis.
Doesn't matter.
Like you want us for threemonths, we'll come work for you
for three months.
You want us to finish thisspecific feature, we'll finish
that specific feature, And we'revery good at it.

(49:50):
So they're all plenty of peoplelike us out there who do this.
Small houses, the huge housesthat subcontract out to China.
So that fixes some other boomand bust because contractors are
expected, like, I have a threemonth contract, I'll be gone in
three months, six months, ayear, whatever that number is.

(50:10):
And it's, and it's knownupfront.
It's not like I got hired andnow I'm scrambling to keep my
job.
'cause we know layoffs arecoming, but who is it gonna be?
It's like, is it me because I'mthe newest or is it not me?
Because I'm really good at whatI do.
And it's all that depends on thecompany, what department you're
in and things like that.
It's not an easy thing to do,but it has mellowed out quite a

(50:33):
lot.
I know a lot of the Sony firstparty companies don't really
hire fire

PJ (50:36):
Yeah.

Rob (50:37):
a whim anymore.

PJ (50:38):
I,

Rob (50:39):
It's this quite a bit difficult to hire people.
With all the training and allthe HR process, there's quite a
cost to hire people and firingthem three months later is just
a waste of that money.
So I think companies havelearned this too, and.
It's not easy on the managementside to hire and fire at will.

(50:59):
If they have to, they will, butit is an expense to them.
So if they can use contractorsor hire you as a part-time,
temporary basis, even if you'retechnically an employee, it's a
different employment system,different set of rules.
I think that fixed a visibleboom bust cycle of games.
It used to be horrible andthere's more to do, don't get me

(51:21):
wrong.

PJ (51:21):
I, I find it fascinating because there's a, there's an
underlying argument here that ifyou look at what has happened in
the game space, especially,there's been incredible
consolidation of smaller studiosinto larger ones.
And so there's an aspect to whatyou're saying that because the
bureaucracies have gotten solarge at these large companies,

(51:44):
like that actually acts as aleavening force against these
boom and bust cycles.
'cause it's harder to hire andfire people it's fascinating
because, one of the naturalresults we have right now is we
have very few independent gamestudios that are out there.
You effectively have like ea asa giant third party studio.

(52:06):
But I remember, you know, yearsago when EA wasn't as big, you
had Activision, you hadBlizzard, you had THQ, these
were all separate companies.
Now we've seen incredibleconsolidation across the board.
For all of these things.
And it's fascinating because I,it's not a, a perspective I ever
thought about before, that thesize of these effectively acts

(52:28):
as this force against the, theboom and bust.

Rob (52:32):
It absolutely does.
and I mean, I've been on hiringpanels where it's like it's,
we'll hire this guy over, thisguy just because he's probably
gonna stick around and this guymay not stick around.
And it's not even you.
It's not even them firing you,it's you leaving.
If you, they're a month and youleave, they'd rather hire the
guy who they know stick aroundfor 12 months, even if it's not
quite as good, because there's asignificant cost to hiring

(52:54):
people.

PJ (52:55):
Fascinating.

Rob (52:55):
So it's also coming back to the layoffs, there's also now a
potential gluttony ofprogrammers in the market.
How does that affect things?
Are they getting rehired atsimilar positions?
Is there enough jobs around?
Are there studios that areexpanding, making new product
lines?
It's like everything's socarefully planned now.

(53:16):
Nothing happens by

PJ (53:17):
Right, Right, I've seen some stuff in our, my LinkedIn feed
about some game companies thatare hiring.
But off the top of my head, I, Ican't think of them as being
major names at this point intime.

Rob (53:30):
That's the point.
There's lots of junior, lots ofgames now are made by junior
programmers doing junior typelevel jobs.
Higher ups, senior programmersmake tools and systems that get
used and then the gameplayelements are done by lots of
junior guys.
I think these layoffs alsorestructure in some ways how
teams are formed of like, Hey,we, we could do more with junior

(53:52):
or less with junior.
We need more senior programmers,which is more cost.
I think this whole thing is justone big machine and then
ultimately it'll wind back andthe structure of the industry
will change because of it.
It's happened over and over toget us to this point.
And I, again, you can say, well,this is happening, so we are
gonna keep doing this.
But plenty of people in gameshave been burned by that long

(54:14):
cycle prediction.
And I think everything in gamesshould be taken as macro scale
blip in time.
This will have a dramatic effecton this and it will ramp down
real quick.
And like I said, it's like yearsago you wanted predicted the
number of contractors in gamesor movers and special effects
to, contract individuals.
Contract companies, and.
It happens because the boom andbustle reflects badly on

(54:35):
companies.
So movers have been throughthis, special effects have been
through this, games have donethe same thing.
And It is just what it is.
It's the nature of producingcontent to get something out.

PJ (54:45):
You do,

Rob (54:46):
It's very reflects very badly to hire them and then just
fire them at the end.
'cause we're done with you.
We don't need you for the nextproject yet.

PJ (54:51):
I wonder if what we're waiting for or what the market
needs effectively is someradical amount of innovation to
shift things up again.
Are we gonna see innovation ingame content from smaller
studios that becomes a newzeitgeist where it's like,
everyone wants to play this gameand it came out of a no-name
studio in the Midwest.

(55:12):
Is there something we need to doin terms of hardware to shift it
up, to create some kind ofinnovation?

Rob (55:17):
I think Steam is the play, the place here, like I said,
it's, you can't really make aquirky game for Xbox or
PlayStation.
You,

PJ (55:24):
Sure.

Rob (55:25):
can, but getting that game out in the, in-channel
marketing, you can go andbroadcast into the world outside
of the stores for sure.
And get it known and get itplayed.
Finding it is the the hard part.
I think Steam plays a big rolehere.
But then if we have all the sameapps and we have all the same
games from all the samecompanies.
Why do we need to make twoversions or three versions or

(55:46):
four versions of that game?
Why don't we just all agree thatthe 3D model was horrible at the
time and today it kind of makessense.
Just like here's a spec, youhave to make this spec hardware
with these speed memories andthings like that.
And it used to be a problem thatgames wouldn't work.
You made your memory faster.

(56:06):
Game wouldn't work.
'cause now timings are off, butall games now are made to a
cross platform and B, bescalable because of the PC side.
So if you just made a base spec,if you said like PSS five
hardware spec, that's what youmake.
You don't run Windows, you don'trun this, you run game OSS from
somebody.
Maybe everyone works on ittogether.

(56:26):
Maybe it's open source.

PJ (56:27):
Sure.

Rob (56:28):
That's game oss that's effectively steam.
To be fair.
Then that's the game os andthat's what you run.
And it's a nice launcher.
It's got all your save games,got all your leaderboard stuff,
all the bullshit of Xbox Gameswon't play with PlayStation
unless you're big like Fortnite.
Magically works on both.
Lots of other games magicallywork on both.
But if me and you made a game,it wouldn't work on both.

(56:49):
It's, it's a bit of a pain inthe ass to do that.
And I think getting rid of bothand having one, I have no idea
how it would work.
I'm just speculating that it'snot hard to see.

PJ (56:59):
uh, I think, I think you're, you're trying to take the
hardware approach here andyou're gonna hate me for what
I'm about to say now.
I think the platform does existacross these things.
I just think it's, it's thesoftware stacks of HTML five.
An unreal engine is effectivelylike the, the stack that these
things ha are converging onto

Rob (57:20):
The, what happens to all the exclusives?
what happens to all of Sony'sfirst party teams, which is
basically what makes thePlayStation.
The PlayStation, you eliminatedall of them by saying use the
Unreal engine.
You also eliminated a wholebunch of really small
programmers who program betterthan the Unreal engine.

PJ (57:38):
oh I'm not trying to get rid of these folks, just to be sure.
I'm just saying that.
If effectively, like thehardware converges every studio
effectively wants to runeverything everywhere else.
You effectively look atconvergence on that software
stack as well.
So whether it's not, it's likeUnreal or something else, I
don't know.
But what I mean to say is that,you are already seeing like a

(57:59):
lot of conversions is happeningjust because you're using the
game engines, whether it'sUnreal or Unity or Cocos 2D or
whatever as effectively thatsubstrate that then runs
everywhere else.

Rob (58:10):
Yeah, but no good games do it.
There are no good unreal games.
They're all bloated, slow,chunky things.
Fortnight's the only kind ofexample, and that's done in
house most unreal games are youcan look at it and go, that's
Unreal game.
If you factor in that all ofSony have all their first party
teams and they do share code,but they don't share an engine,
so they all have their own wayof doing things and they all,

(58:31):
they'll learn like, this is areally cool way to do this trick
and it works well with thishardware.
Share that with.
Insomnia, like a naughty dog ornaughty dog.
Share it with Gorilla and SuckerPunch and whoever else is out
there.
So they all have access to thisreally cool way of doing things,
but they have to do itthemselves, which is, again,
it's a very different approachto a, a shared engine where it's

(58:52):
all worked for you.
When you get what you get, thisis, there's a little stubs of
code that all kind of work ordon't work together.
You have to integrate it intoyour engine.
So it's a, it's a tool setrather than a, complete engine.

PJ (59:06):
a and this goes back to my claim, that what we need
actually is innovation and gamesto drive better technology so
that we're not all under thetyranny of first person
shooters.
Because if we're all under thetyranny of first person
shooters, we're gonna end uplike with the same software
stacks everywhere.

Rob (59:23):
and I, this comes again back to Sony exclusives.
There aren't many first personshooters

PJ (59:30):
Hmm.

Rob (59:30):
and they have very, very games.
You have like, uh, gorillasHorizon Dawn versus Insomnia Lan
or Spider-Man and whatevernaughty dogs working on won't be
a first person shooter.
It might have shooting aspects,but it won't be a first person
shooter.
In fact, none of those games areactually first person.
They're all third person.
So there is definitely like acultural difference between Xbox

(59:56):
and PlayStation.
Um, Nintendo too.
They fit more, I think on thePlayStation side.
Xbox is basically, we'll take itif we can get it.
And that's why they ended upwith all the first person
shooters'cause they came fromthe pc.
Sony is definitely on the otherside.
So having a console that wasjust for both may not work.
it could happen, but I don'tthink it will happen.
I think we'll stick with twoidentical pieces of hardware

(01:00:18):
with two different softwarestacks that you have to support.
I think it's the status quoright now is what we have, at
least for the next generation.
They're both gonna make a nextgeneration, but all of these
business things of like, howdoes this fit in with Microsoft?
Have an access to a PS six, arethey gonna change the ps, make
the Xbox better?
So it's just different or theyjust stay the same because it

(01:00:39):
makes the porting job easier.
And they're technically aporting platform at this point.
It's not a lead platform.
So I don't know, it could go anynumber of ways, but I don't see
any fundamental change right nowinto how consoles are gonna be
for the next decade.
Other than potentially justgoing away.

PJ (01:00:55):
That's maybe is the question, like if, if we've
effectively converged on a PCmodel at that point in time,
whether or not we have commonhardware or not.
Perhaps this all goes to theparticular ip, the cultures, the
types of games that thesecompanies want to create that
effectively shifts them frombeing any sort of hardware
companies to simply beingsoftware publishers.

Rob (01:01:18):
Yeah, so we'll have to see what happens.
Again, it's a long-termprediction.
I think the next generation ofconsoles will happen as normal
after that.
We're gonna start seeing somecertain convergences as to how
this works.
But I do think we probably haveone more generation, which puts
us about a decade out.
'cause there's, there's three,four years left of this
generation, plus the nextgeneration I think.

(01:01:41):
Yeah, within mid 2030s consoleswill look very different to what
they are today

PJ (01:01:47):
So they'll either, they'll look very different or they'll
look more the same than everbefore.
Right?

Rob (01:01:53):
or both.
And people might say, wellthat's a long prediction.
Like tell, of course they'lllook different in 10 years.
Is that really is a bigdecision?
I think it is because 10 yearsago they looked exactly like
they looked down

PJ (01:02:06):
Hold on folks.
There's something we didn't getto and we want to touch on it
very briefly.

Rob (01:02:11):
There's one thing that we've not talked about this
entire podcast, which is hugehere, and that is mobile.

PJ (01:02:16):
Yes, that is true.
we we did skip that.

Rob (01:02:19):
If I was, gonna make a quirky game, I would make it for
iOS, probably get it on Apple tvand it's, there's a whole nother
play here.
Of course.
It's why Apple never made a gameconsole.
And do they care?
They all technically the biggestgaming platform in the world,
and they have great hardware.
So they take that new iPhoneship and pull it in an Apple tv,
that's PlayStation power rightthere.

(01:02:41):
So they can make these games,whether they're just expecting
it to organically happen overtime, which maybe it will, maybe
if they, in five years whenApple TV's a way more powerful
can be on them.
But then PCs will be way morepowerful too.
So there's always thisgenerational gap, but at some
point, does it matter that we'restill in that building phase

(01:03:03):
right now of like, if you make a2D game on Windows today, does
it matter what video card youhave?
Does it matter if it's fiveyears old?
Because it's still plenty fastenough to do exactly what you
want to do and it's only whenyou get into the really high end
volumetrics and ultra.
Complex compute shaders that youneed.
The high-end GPUs, they'replenty.

(01:03:25):
The games you can make withoutthat.
And there are a lot of games oniOS and Apple TV and they use
game controllers.
They use Xbox or PlayStationgame controllers.
Which, which I think that'sfunny'cause I, I think, that, is
that an admission that Applecan't make a

PJ (01:03:38):
so I,

Rob (01:03:40):
Like you think Apple could make a game controller?
They could definitely designone.
No doubt about it.
Is it the fact they say use anXbox or a PlayStation
controller?
Your choice, whichever youprefer.
Is that just saying like, wecan't do any better?
These things are almost perfectfor playing games.

PJ (01:03:53):
That was not the way I was gonna take it.
I think, what they'reeffectively signaling to the
market right now is we have noreal intention to want the Apple
TV to be a, game console.
I think that they could put upmore powerful chip in there, and
if they still didn't make theirown controller, they're still
signaling that to the market.

(01:04:15):
My guess is that they, even ifthey made, you know, the exact
same controller with the exactsame buttons as Xbox,
PlayStation, Logitech, pick one,doesn't matter.
Like that would actually be thesignal to say, actually now we
care about games.
On your iOS device or on theApple tv?
I think it's actually more of abusiness thing rather than a

(01:04:37):
product thing to

Rob (01:04:39):
don't agree.
I'm the exact, I'm the exactopposite.
I think they're just like, thesecontrollers are great.
It's like we are not gonna makeone better use.
The one you're most familiarwith, if you play Xbox games and
you want to play games on Appletv, use your Xbox controller.
It's comforting, it's familiar.
It's ease of entry to play gameson the, on the iOS, it's one

(01:05:00):
less thing to buy, which issurprisingly from Apple.
That is,

PJ (01:05:03):
so what's fascinating with that though, it, and this is,
this is why I still will, lockinto the business side of it

Rob (01:05:11):
Apple don't do games and they'd get slammed if they made
a controller.
Don't forget, half the worldhates one of the controllers.

PJ (01:05:17):
no, no, totally.
But my point is that, if it'slike, go use your Xbox or
PlayStation controller, it makesa presumption that you already
have an Xbox or a PlayStation.
So to me it, it shrinks thatVenn diagram down to, you have
an Apple TV and you have one ofthose consoles.

Rob (01:05:34):
Yeah, but it's not.
'cause you can just go buy anXbox controller for 40 bucks.
Apple would make a controllerand it would be more than 40
bucks.
The remote control is more than40 bucks.
So the controller woulddefinitely be PlayStation five
controllers are 80 bucks,they're getting inexpensive.
Uh, but, and then it's, I thinkit's like just buy an existing
controller.
If you're serious about playinggames on your Apple tv, I think

(01:05:57):
we could do a whole notherpodcast on gaming, on iOS and
mobile,

PJ (01:06:02):
I think there's a general podcast we should have on mobile
gaming.
So I do think that we have a lotof very rich material there that
we will do in an upcomingpodcast.
So look forward folks to afuture episode where we get into
the rise of mobile gaming.