There has been
new market disruption happening on the mobile and PC side of gaming. These are customers that Microsoft, but moreso Sony, have little access to. Look at Sonys PS4 announcement conference. They spent so long talking about bringing Playstation everywhere, but it definitely isnt yet.
This comes up almost every year since the advent of smartphone gaming and hasn't been actually true since. Console revenue (and market size) still considerably outpaces PC and Mobile gaming in markets with a strong console presence. The way the data gets skewed toward mobile or PC is by including markets that have weak console presence (Brazil, Russia) or near-zero console presence (China) and including their revenue and market size to make PC and mobile gaming look much stronger than it actually is in markets like the US and the UK. If you are speaking purely globally, then PC and mobile have a larger revenue stream and potential market than consoles - but that market is so culturally and preferentially diverse that you couldn't make a single product to satisfy even 10% of that market anyway. Versus, consoles are inherently a more narrowed market and it's absolutely possible to produce a product that interests +30% of your potential market.
Furthermore, there is little data to suggest that the PC market and the mobile market have significant cross-over potential with the console market or that growth in PC or mobile is a direct negative growth for console gaming. Because,
for some reason, the data never works the other direction amongst analysts. I haven't seen a single article discussing how the adoption rate of current gen consoles is significantly outpacing the adoption rate of previous gen consoles AND that current gen consoles have significantly more buy-in from consumers (more games per console purchased) than previous gen consoles and that growth is going to be
"the end" of mobile and PC gaming. Why not?
Because that's fucking stupid. Yet, there's countless articles discussing how similar growth in PC and mobile is the death of consoles.
The process of creating a console is inherently limiting. You (1) spend millions, billions perhaps on research, designing, development, manufacturing, shipping and advertising a console that you are (2) selling for little profit, all while (3) severely limiting your audience to a relatively select few as the barriers-to-entry are too high (hundreds of dollars). None of this is good.
You are not wrong about the costs and profit margins on console hardware. However, the audience is hardly limited. All three previous gen consoles sold over 80m units LTD. Both the Xbox One and PS4 are on pace to exceed that. The argument is generally made that PCs and mobile devices have significantly larger hardware sales, and that's true, but how many of those sales are dedicated to strictly gamers? 30%? 40%? How many game consoles are sold to gamers? Nearly 100%. That sort of defined market is far easier to do research against, market to, and produce content for than a larger market that a majority of which isn't even interested in the
type of product you are making.
Playstation and Xbox as brands are starting to diverge from just about gaming. Notice how Microsofts media and entertainment services are all named after the Xbox (Xbox Music, Xbox Video). The same with Sony and Playstation (Playstation Vue for TV). Its somewhat contradictory to see these brands being spread out everywhere for music and movies but the gaming is exclusives to your one living room box of choice.
Except this has been true for almost 2 decades. The PS2 played DVD movies. The PS3's biggest marketing push was to support the Blu-Ray format. The Xbox 360 dashboard had a plethora of ads for all the non-gaming apps and services it provided. Even the Wii had basic apps for internet browsing and Netflix. You can no longer make a dedicated gaming console in today's market. I'm not sure where you are trying to go with this, because the lack of dedication to gaming is even more distinct on PCs and mobile. The difference being that non-gaming functionality and software on a gaming console adds value to the intended purpose of the console (gaming). While non-gaming functionality and software
IS the intended purpose of PCs and mobile hardware and gaming adds values to that.
So I thought, how does this problem get solved? Streaming does help, but it involves major bandwidth issues and puts the quality of the game experience in the hands of ISPs, which historically doesn't work out well when unnecessary. Then the idea of engines came about. Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, CryEngine, etc. They all have supports for a myriad of platforms. Even more closed down engines like Frostbite can even work on mobile. Then I thought, Why dont we just
have Playstation and Xbox game engines, and integrate it into their PSN/XBL services?
Think about it:
- Developers create one set of code/resources
- Developers commit code to servers, which create different builds per supported platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Web Browsers, etc) and hosts these builds when its time to sell through a PSN/XBL app on your phone, tablet, PC, console, etc.
- Customers buy the game on the platform they choose, and a compatible build of that game downloads onto their device, provided their device supports the correct form of input for the game (controllers, KB + M, VR, touch, etc). There is very little difference between that and how Unity/Unreal works now in terms of development.
Even developing on a multi-platform engine like Unity, you are still likely to have multiple code branches and builds for different platforms for optimization, control sets, certain gameplay quirks, and external plugins (DLC store, in-game transactions, stat tracking/leaderboard support). A multi-platform engine just makes this significantly easier by maintaining +90% of your code base and assets but it isn't like you can just flip a switch or check a box and your game is magically functional and optimized for PS4, PC, Xbox, IOS and Andriod all at the same time. There is nothing that can do that, and likely there never will be. There are too many variables to account for in just the destination frameworks, let alone how you wrote your initial code.
There's also zero incentive for any first-party to produce something that could. Multi-platform engines are developed by external parties outside of the hardware manufacturer competition sphere. They make multi-platform engines because they don't have any vested interest in where you release your product, they just want you to use their engine. And giving you the tools to release on as many platforms as possible makes their engine that much more enticing to a developer. The hardware manufacturers, on the other hand, don't want you releasing on multiple platforms. In fact, they go out of their way to ensure you don't through licensing agreements, exclusivity contracts, parity clauses, etc. Sony has absolutely zero reason to sell you IOS, PC, or Xbox games through the PSN, even if they generate revenue from you purchasing it through their storefront, even if that game is exclusive to their storefront, because it adds no value to their hardware or ecosystem.
Pros
- The Engine idea multiplies the potential audience by a crazy amount because the brands become accessible to more devices, and if this become the main way to develop and distribute games, the investments into a console could drop to $0 because you may not ever need to make another one. Instead, Sony and Microsoft can focus on the parts of the gaming industry that actually makes them money (software and services).
- For consumers, you can still maintain having an Xbox Live or a PSN that exists across multiple platforms. They could still charge for multiplayer (ehh). They could still have exclusive titles, just exclusive to a service instead of hardware (which Id like to think everyone and their mother would agree is better). Playstation or Xbox is not just something you have in one place, but something you could have everywhere
- For developers, it's going to be much easier to get noticed on a Playstation Store/Xbox Marketplace than say Apple's App Store, which released more games per month than Steam has in it's entire existence.
- Also for developers, no requirement for a definitive console build means no dev kits required, decreasing the barrier-of-entry for console games and enabling more console game developers. There also would be no need for an upfront cost for accessing the library; Sony/Microsoft would get their 30% cut through the service, like how Valve does with Source 2, and it puts more money in the developers hands for every sale.
- For Sony and Microsoft, their brands and their games are now in more places, but still maintain some form of control over the development process by providing the IDE and APIs for online, trophies/achievements, and more.
- For Sony and Microsoft, the services being available in more places means higher retention of consumers, which means they'll be more likely to use the service and purchase from that service.
If they never need to make another console, and the consumer never needs to purchase one, they wouldn't focus on making software for a system that doesn't make any money. They would shut down that division entirely because they've been reduced to being a storefront for software on competing hardware. They're now not only competing against each other (Xbox and PS) but now also against Steam, Android and iTunes.
Service exclusivity is an extreme drop-off from hardware exclusivity. Service exclusivity means almost nothing in terms of gaining sustainable customer support. I'm not invested in your service if there is no investment to be made on my part. Customers are extremely fluid between Origin, GoG and Steam - even when products are exclusive to one service. Customers are not nearly as fluid between Xbox and Playstation.
In your example, you have just made the PSN and XBL services as densely populated as Steam and iTunes by expanding their potential storefront marketplace dramatically. It is only easier to get noticed on the current gen console marketplace because it's a closed ecosystem with limited titles. And the reason it's impossible to get noticed on, say, Steam, is because it's not locked to a hardware specific ecosystem and everyone releases everything on it. This would literally be shooting yourself in the foot.
Simply put: Customers and developers get their games everywhere. Xbox and Playstation brands are in more people's hands. Everyone wins, right? Probably.
Cons
- Would AAA publishers be willing to give up the customized engines they have invested years into in order to use one everyone else is using? Would Nintendo even try doing something like this? I obviously have left them out of this conversation because they still put the biggest emphasis on hardware between the three.
- Optimizing for a single platform.. is kind of gone when there isn't just one platform. Would be an issue for the high-end of games.
- iOS and Android currently ask for a cut of in-game purchases, which means that the game you bought from Xbox for your iPhone may have to be bought through a web browser or a completely different computer instead of the Xbox app itself.
No, they would not. There would also be significant resistance from every current multi-platform engine developer in addition to all the major studios that use proprietary engines.
Optimization doesn't just happen for high-end games. If a 2D platformer doesn't have at least some optimization, it will still run like shit. Even FEZ ran like absolute crap on certain hardware before significant optimizations were made. Minecraft is another offender. If you can't (or don't) allow optimizations per hardware spec, no one is going to use your engine.
Steam actually does this too in a way. If your game has in-game purchases, they generally request that you include a 'DLC pack' that can be sold through the Steam storefront containing some in-game purchase items, currency, or whatever. That's why many of the FTP titles on Steam have DLC packs that you can't get anywhere but Steam. It's a compromise. I assume that PSN and XBL have similar compromises.
To conclude, you are making a ton of incorrect assumptions about the current market, about the size, scope and purchasing habits of PC and mobile market, about the size, scope and purchasing habits of the console market, about the differences between PC, mobile and console consumers, about how games are developed, about what engines do, about why optimization is important, about why Microsoft and Sony don't want to just be a storefront, about how proprietary hardware drives Microsoft and Sony software development, about why closed, distinct platforms are actually better for manufacturers, developers and consumers, about the valuation of hardware exclusivity vs service exclusivity, and about how the industry, in general, works.
